#vimr

Apr. 24th is the first birthday of VimR! To celebrate, I'll be having beer at Augustiner on Friday Apr. 24th from 7pm.

This time, the second trending repository and developer on GitHub! (with much less stars though...)

On the Hacker News front page: it seems it hit the first spot for a brief moment: https://twitter.com/hn_bot_top1/status/500668158701998080

As I went to Hacker News it was (only) on the fifths spot:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8186407 (now not anymore)

Although ViM had served me very well in the past, I've been using Atom as my main editor these days. The reason why I had chosen Atom is mainly because I was sick of the console-like experience ViM forced me to have. Also, it required a lot of custom configurations to use it reasonably productively, which I thought was too old school.

But even while my Atom experience was quite satisfactory, I missed ViM so much because of the big community it has and was always looking for a way to go back while avoiding all the bad experiences I had on my Macintosh machines.

For those who are used to using graphical, no-configuration-required environments and are trying to use ViM on a Mac once and for all, I'd like to share here how I managed to return to our glorious ViM once again.

First of all, for a better GUI experience I found this awesome project recently announced on Hackernews: VimR. it has a native file browser on the left side as Atom has and doesn't use emulation. check the website: http://vimr.org

Also, for people who hate configuration, I recommend using pre-configured vimrc files for now because public vimrc distributions aim to cover all the needs you might have. For general use, I'm pretty sure you will like it: spf13-vim(https://github.com/spf13/spf13-vim)

Just an excerpt from a discussion going on on github:

I don't see VimR as an IDE, or to be precise, not as a full-fledged IDE: I've seen the (current) pinnacle of IDEs in JetBrains' products like IDEA or AppCode. No, they're not perfect, but they're really, really really good. I think that it is impossible—and you should not try— to be on par with such IDEs. I know that you can extend Vim(R) with plugins to a certain degree such that it becomes a kind of lightweight IDE, IDE-nano for various languages if you will. And I think that's the niche where VimR could fit in very well:

Real IDEs for serious and professional coding,

VimR as an IDE for lightweight and complementary coding and normal editing needs (personally I would love this for markdown and latex),

(Mac)Vim for pure editing needs

The following are few things I have in mind to achieve this:

First, use as many of Vim-stuff for things, like wig or auto-save on focus loss (I think that reimplementations of those features in VimR and keeping them in sync with Vim would cost too much time and effort),

However, find a good way to offer/set these features in the GUI, eg: you could add an option to ignore vimrc and offer a way of configuring VimR in the preference window for the, say, non-power user. In the background we use the Vim options to achieve those features. The power user can let VimR read their own vimrc and do whatever they want. Just a thought: whether it is a smart way of doing it is a different question,

Be a good OS X citizen, ie standard shortcuts, standard behavior whenever possible, etc.,

Integrate some IDE features, for instance a plugin system for preview pane/window for various formats, eg markdown, latex, etc.