Fed up by using Eclipse (So slow) and Netbeans (always crashing), some folks at Sensio Labs told me to start using Vim. At first, I said: “Just the name makes me want to puke, but why not.”. A few weeks later, guess which tool I used to edit my code? Yes, Vim. No, I didn’t even puke!

VIM does not stand for “VIM Is Magic” but it could. It’s lightweight and usable everywhere. Whether you’re editing code, writing a blogpost in markdown or configuring an apache vhost over an ssh connection, it’s a wonderful tool to do the job.

The hard part with vim is the learning. It will take you some time… But it worth it.

The exquise beauty of vim is that it’s nearly entirely customizable. If you’re not satisfied with keyboards shortcut, change them! Do you want to have the key F10 do something when you type it, you can! I configured this key to remove spaces filled lines in my code with a simple regular expression.

VIM is so customizable and extendable that with installing a few plugins and tools, you can transform it in a full featured blazing-fast IDE.

The first thing you need to do is to install “exuberant-ctags”. Without it, vim cannot auto-complete from files you didn’t open or jump to another method in other files. Once your tags are generated, the method-hop won’t be as good as eclipse because it’s not contextual, but it’s pretty acurate and it’s DAMN FAST!

Then I use these plugin to give an “IDE” feel to my vim:

• NERDTree: A file explorer in your vim? yay!
• minibufexplorer: Switch between buffers easily!
• NERDCommenter: (Un)/Comment your code quickly
• snipMate: I can haz Textmate styles snippets!
• surround: Tired of navigating through your code to change double
  quote to simple quote? Surround do it with only a few strokes.
• php-doc: Speed up the phpDoc editing
• Align: Align your code in a few strokes!
• matchit: Navigate in control structures or html tags, only with the
  % key.

Also, one of the more important point of using vim: It’s available anywhere.

But be warned, once you’ll get used to the vim philosophy, it will be difficult to switch back to an other IDE. 😉

If you’re curious and want to give a try without searching and installing the plugin by yourself, clone my vim
config. But you’ll still have to read the docs 😉