23rd May 2019 Why Vim

Seven years ago this blog post by Mark O’Connor changed my life.

On September 19th, I said goodbye to my trusty MacBook Pro and started developing exclusively on an iPad + Linode 512. This is the surprising story of a month spent working in the cloud.

Mark went from working locally on his MacBook to working in the cloud using his iPad.nWith a reliable network connection Mark could take his work with him anywhere.nFrom the office to the coffee shop, Mark’s mobility was made possible by the portability of Vim.

Perhaps the only reason this transition has been so smooth was because my favourite editor IDE looks and feels almost exactly the same running on an iSSH console as it did running locally on my Macbook. iSSH supports xterm-256color, which means you can still have pleasant colour schemes despite working in a terminal. All my plugins are there, my code-completion, quick navigation and so on.

Seven years ago I started work at MIT.nI needed to work on dozens of different systems running a variety of operating systems.nI could no longer rely on BBEdit — my text editor of choice for over a decade — to be availablenBefore long VIM became integrated into my workflow.nToday VIM is not only the best text editor available, it is my favorite text editor.