Re: Is vim just for programmers?

> Searching the web for people's views on writing methods I
> found a number who said that one should use vim for
> programming but emacs for other kinds of writing. So I had a
> look at emacs out of curiosity but couldn't see any real
> advantage for me in learning it. Am I missing something here?
> Is anyone else still using vim for writing lengthy texts?

Me :)

Yes, there's a decently sized contingent of [La]TeX users on the
vim ML, but they mostly appear to answer questions about
Vim+[La]TeX integration plugins or use, and then they go silent.
Which is how the list works in general -- ask a question and
usually the right people pick up on it and answer; instead of
having people write unsolicited diatribes on their favorite
topics whether [La]TeX, scripting, Ex commands, or
Unicode/BOM/character-encodings stuff (though I've gotta admit
that just about everything I know regarding U/BOM/ce, I've
learned from Tony's elucidating replies that occasionally go off
on pedantic dissertations -- thanks, Tony!).

I think Vim's primary users are "people who want to edit text
more efficiently". A large subset of those lazy people (self
included) are programmers, but do include [La]TeX users, system
administrators, people who email a lot and use Vim as an external
editor...and the list goes on. I tinkered with Emacs but grew
frustrated with (1) using it over remote SSH/telnet/RS-232
connections that didn't always reliably send things like alt/meta
or arrow keys; (2) at the time, on my underpowered 486 DX/100,
Emacs was a dog; and (3) it was harder to be productive out of
the box without amassing a customized config file that I then had
to tote around and keep in sync across machines. Tim O'Reilly
had a good post[1] about this around the time I made the
full-time jump to Vim.

So now I use Vim like I used to use qedit in DOS to write all my
papers, project documentation, code, and other text-format
content. Except, well, email and text-boxes on web pages (though
there are TB/FF plugins for that)

-tim

[1]
http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/1999/unix_editor.html

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