Comments on: Why I’m using Windows nagware on my Linux box

By: Tim McCormack

Tim McCormack — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:43:08 +0000

@sunjammer: Absolutely! Sure, I could do it from the command line, but it's *way* faster do it from the editor interface.

By: sunjammer

sunjammer — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:59:14 +0000

Not to mention recursive search through a directory tree. If you want to do things like "look for every file with the word LINUX in it in this filesystem", Textpad/Textpad32 is your program.

By: Paul Glover

Paul Glover — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 14:59:36 +0000

Yes, GVim is a good starting point. You can use the normal Vim commands and keystrokes, but have the option to fall back to the menus for commands you don't know or rarely use. Also the commands are shown alongside the menu options making a handy quick reference.

Or you could take the approach I was forced into. I took on the sysadmin liaison role in my department (a Solaris shop), and had no choice but to learn vim. Up until then I'd wanted to, but the learning curve scared me silly. Started off knowing just enough to edit and save, and picked up more as I went along (having a crib sheet pinned up beside the monitor helped here).

Now I use vim and it's variants everywhere I can, and feel totally out of my comfort zone if forced to use anything else. It can be learned, and it's worth it (just don't be surprised if you find yourself pressing Esc :x when you finish writing a blog post... ;-) )

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 14:35:26 +0000

For learning vim, I've found the vim-tutorial to work great (I ran through it on Windows, came with the install of gvim). It helped me dip my toe into the more complex areas of vim editing, with a little assistance. It started out simple, but turned out to be surprisingly helpful!

By: Cullen

Cullen — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 12:01:17 +0000

If you are not looking forward to trying to learn vim, there are handy Dandy faqs and stuff online. Also you could try Gvim. It's vim with a nice graphical interface around it. You can still use all the keyboard shortcuts and everything, but you can also use the mouse. Quite cool.

By: Kamil Kisiel

Kamil Kisiel — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 01:35:01 +0000

Definitely Vim. It can do all of the things in your list. If you want modifier key shortcuts, nothing keeps you from creating your own mappings within Vim. It might take you a while to get up and running, but once you do, you won't want to go back to anything else. As a bonus, it's cross-platform so you're not locked in to any platform/API like you are with something like TextPad. I've been a Vim user for years since I started out learning Vi on a UNIX terminal in early highschool because it was the only thing I had available for editing email. Once you get over the initial learning hump, it's fairly smooth flying from there and you can discover new things all the time. I keep all my configuration files on an HTTP accessible subversion server so that I can sync them to any machine I am working on and then send any new modifications back upstream and propagate them on to all my other machines. I recommend #vim on the Freenode IRC network for help.