I’ve often wondered myself, does visual studio rot your brain? I openly admit I’m a vi and vim bigot. I used vi back in university, however, it wasn’t until my mks days that I solidified my bigotry. I worked primarly on a java codebase with the odd bit of awk or make files mixed in.

So without further ado, here are the top x reasons I’m in love with a text editor that’s name begins with the letters “vi”:

• Command mode. For me, that is the key feature in vi. I have access to my entire keyboard for commands instead of having to use key modifiers like alt, ctrl etc. I tried emacs, if I was good at chords I’d have played piano. This is also the biggest hindrance to new users adopting vi.
• I despise using a mouse. To be more precise I hate moving my right hand between my keyboard and my mouse.
• At times, I work in various operating systems, most of which have some flavour of vi out of the box. I know I can login to any *nix OS, open a shell and type “vi” and be up and running. Contrast that with an IDE like visual studio.
• I’m part of a club. Let’s face it, vi is a clique bordering on a cult. In order to get in the club you have to tolerate months, if not years, of being utterly unproductive in this crappy editor if you want to have any hope of getting in. The average person’s experience with vi consists of opening it, trying to type a line, getting three key strokes in before the computer starts beeping. They then look around the room for anyone who has any clue whatsoever how to close this shitty editor. After rebooting they type in “pico” and get back to work. It’s an editor that comes with a built-in hazing ritual. That alone is enough to solidify my love.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.