Many of the craftsmen and apprentices at 8th Light use the VIM text editor because of the efficiencies it affords them. VIM makes it easy to quickly navigate a document using minimal effort because most actions are accessible near home row on the keyboard.

The biggest hurdle I have encountered when starting to use VIM is how absolutely crippled it can make you feel. Compound this with the advice that most people give beginners: disable the mouse, and disable the arrow keys. This certainly forces the user to find the VIM ways of doing things, but it can really slow things down when getting accustomed to the new editor.

Another apprentice, Ben Trevor, put together a blog post detailing the best ways to configure VIM and the patterns used to get started. He also pointed me to this blog, which makes the recommendation to newbies NOT to disable the arrows and mouse, (despite the inefficiencies that these two entities introduce) and to instead discover them yourself. For example, while pairing with another apprentice today on a kata that turns a base ten decimal into a single precision floating point binary string, I quickly realized how much easier it is to use the h, j, k, and l keys to move left, down, up, and right, respectively, or to use ‘o’ to insert a new line at proper indentation, or resetting the caps lock key to ctrl to make gestures even easier. Am I already starting to drink the kool aid? I also learned a new word: mantissa. It means significand.

At the moment, I have my colors configured. I’ll need to set up tmux so that I can have separate consoles in the same window, making it easier to run tests while developing without having to switch windows. I’ll also need to experiment with the NerdTree plugin, which shows and hides your tree of files. In addition, splitting the screen vertically will be advantageous in order to have the spec on one side, the lib file on the other, and the testing in a pane at the bottom.