Drinkable Chicken

I’m in the process of reorganizing a few things here. Development-related things. One of the changes I want to make is to make more use of vi for editing.

I’ve been using (several variants of) vi since the mid-90s (in addition to other editors), but by some definition you could say that I’ve never really used it. What I’ve been doing is trying to make it work like most mainstream editors, with a few commands thrown in. You know, moving through text using the cursor keys, selecting things by holding Shift, etc. Vim makes this particularly easy. But by doing so, I’ve never really experienced the real power of vi.

Some people argue that this is not optimal, to say the least:

Turns out, this is just a completely wrong way to use vi or vim. Using vi/vim properly, you don’t use it modally. You are always in normal mode, and only enter insert mode for short bursts of typing text, after which you press <Esc> to go to normal mode.

So it may be worth exploring that. Fortunately vi clones are available for pretty much every operating system, so if I want to I can use it on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The learning curve may be steep, but it’s probably worth it.

What I do wonder is, is there any reason to use a different version than vim? There are other clones; nvi, elvis, to name a few, but it seems like those haven’t been updated in years. Vim seems to be the 800-pound gorilla of vi implementations, and it’s not hard to see why, given its abundance of features, and the fact that it’s being actively developed.