Vim - walking without crutches

In his provocatively titled blog post ""Everyone Who Tried to Convince Me to use Vim was Wrong"", Yehuda Katz showed how he switched from TextMate to Vim without experiencing an initial dip in productivity. Begin by emulating the working environment that you are comfortable with, then adopt Vim's idioms as and when you discover them. This is a welcome alternative to the hazing ""do everything the Vim way from day 1"" approach, which is widely advocated by veterans. Anything that offers a leg-up Vim's infamous learning curve is to be commended. But be careful not to get too comfortable. Mastering Vim requires a change in mindset and if you don't break some of your old habits you could miss out.
I will begin by showing how a TextMate user can make Vim feel almost like home. I will show what preferences you can set in your vimrc file, and which plugins you can install to emulate the TextMate experience. Like walking with crutches, some of these features are useful while you build your strength, but if you can learn to walk without them you will be able to move faster. I will show how.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Drew Neil has been involved with the Radiant community since 2007, working for a number of web agencies as well as collaborating on open source projects such as Fat Free CRM and various Radiant extensions. In 2009 he founded Vimcasts.org, a series of free screencasts about the text editor, Vim. In 2010 he went freelance. He works on a *pro bono* basis for the West Port Book Festival and is also the creator of All-Sorts.org, the website that harvests *terms of venery* from Twitter. He'll be happy if you ask him about the collective noun for pirates. Arrrr.