Leave MacVim To The Noobz

If it wasn't painfully obvious from my tweeting, I spent the better half of the first weekend of August, at a Ruby conference. The one topic that I was fairly positive would creep up, yet somehow magically flew away, was the "editor talk." No one was comparing their Vim configs to people's lowly Textmate installs. No Emacs vs Sublime Text 2, nothing really. Damn shame.

What did show it's face, was people's love of Sublime Text 2. Wait for the cmd-tab, wait for it...wait. BOOM! Sublime Text. If it wasn't ST2, then it was the dreaded MacVim; hater-instiling that you forcibly cmd-tab (that is a fucking reach) everywhere. MacVim users probably silently wish that they could cmd-tab through their legs to speed up their walking pace.

I know why told us that opinions (he used the word "tastes") would begin to define us over what we created; however, I draw the line at being defined by how many times I can cmd-tab faster than the next person. To help all of you cmd-tab loving folks (I have fucked my cmd-tab seo on this post), here is a list of really cool things to get you back into terminal Vim.

  1. Take a look at updating OS X's default version with this post
  2. Being at the terminal level allows you to NOT cmd-tab to it. This in itself will speed you up tremendously.
  3. Download and use tmux. It has a learning curve but is well worth it for when you start pair programming and as a damn-good terminal multiplexer
  4. Seriously, download and use tmux. It can be found and installed via brew and you can even buy a book about it
  5. If this is your first rodeo, find a great set of defaults, either through Janus or Yadr.
  6. Read through what the above config files do, test and try every last section
  7. Go here, read it all. They are way smarter than I am and always have great blog posts on developmenty things.

Give it two weeks. Close MacVim, find a terminal that you can stand, download tmux and give your new-found freedom a whirl. Then send me a message on the Twitters and tell me how it is going.