Re: Is vim just for programmers?

Hi Anthony,

Asking such general questions doesn't make sense in practise. (IMHO).

If you want to get a job done and if you want to know whether Vim is a
great tool to get the job done than ask how to setup Vim to assist you.

See :h design-not

Follow Bram's advice: Watch yourself. Try to find out on which things
you spend most time and try to speed up those tasks. If you don't know
how to do this get help (ig by chatting on irc).

Vim is good at this: You can speed up many tasks easily.
If it comes to more advanced things such as IDE features (code
completion etc.).. you still can make Vim use languages which can do the
task for you. Examples: Eclim (headless eclipse) or scion (Haskell on
the fly syntax checker)

Using other editors one of those things which can slow down is switchi
mouse / keyboard. Using Vim you don't have switch because you can do
everything you like using the keyboard.

One bad thing about Vim is that you can't quit if you've never done that
before even though the start screen tells you to run :q
At least I didn't understand it that time.

If it comes to writing books there is no easy answer either.
Eg Emacs has some plugins to preview LaTex formulars.
Vim will never do this.

Programmers naturally write much text. And vim assists you very well.
Many people (including me) use Vim even if it has some weakness such as
not being able to receive feedback from other applications in a
concurrent way. You need such a feature to implement debugger
integration.. (Yes I know there are many workarounds. I wrote one
myself. But Vim itself is not thread safe which says all...)

That's why I end up coding in Vim while using Eclipse for debugging..

I also write Emails using Vim.
I keep many notes in files I manage with Vim.

Use the tool which is best for a given task.
Use google and irc to find out which tool that is.

If you consider using a non distracting editor such as
http://they.misled.us/dark-room
keep in mind that it takes less than 5 configuration lines to make Vim
fit this use case as well.
Have a look at :h motion to find out why Vim might be a better choice
for writing text. Than compare this list with the features other text
editor provide. Also keep in mind that it's very easy to script Vim.

Marc Weber

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