Editor Practice

The last year of my life has been one of major transition. I've just moved out of the city I've lived longest of anywhere in my life (seven years!). I didn't move far but making that decision felt huge. Within the past six months, I got married and promptly convinced my husband to adopt the world's cutest cat, changed jobs, and then decided to buy this house. It's no wonder that my attention to coding has slipped. (Even now, our cat Dolly is perched in my lap, occasionally scrambling to block my keyboard). However, using the philosophy that got me to learn to code in the first place, this week I remembered that it's never too late to start again. 

As is typical for my self-directed coding sessions, I began by playing around with a few old code bases before settling on starting a new project, one I've had in the back of my mind for a long time. Of course, as soon as I had created the rails project and went to edit it, my usual text editor crashed. I decided to return to using vim, a tool I had developed some proficiency with in my last job. Curious about how to use vim as a full IDE, I went looking for resources and found Janus. As I was reading the documentation, I decided to complete vim's built-in tutorial (which can be reached by typing vimtutor in the terminal). Previously, any skills I'd picked up had been as needed and through specific Googling, but it was nice to run through a structured set of commands, and I was shocked by what vim could do. Since then I've begun working on my personal project with MacVim and enjoyed the process, even though there's some adjustment. This blog post was helpful in outlining some of what I'd learned on my own, and pointing me in the direction of new plugins to install. I highly recommend Vim, even if just so you can get the reaction I did once at a code sprint ("You use vim?!?")...though not sure if that was really compliment.