To all the editors I’ve loved before…
July 10th, 2008 4:49:02 pm pst by 
Sterling Camden
To a programmer, the text editor you use is not a matter of religion. It’s much stronger than that. It’s more like love — the initial excitement and the thrill of subsequently discovered features leads to a warm familiarity and intimate knowledge – the extreme comfort of working together to create something special.
Today, I switched my customary editor. But before I reveal my newfound relationship, I’d like to review some old ones.
My first text editor on Data General’s AOS was called SPEED. The user interface was comprised of only a command line, with very little text displayed unless you asked for it. We had a saying, “SPEED kills”, because it was quite easy to trash your whole file. To “type” text out on the display, you used the “T” command. Right next to “T” on the keyboard is “Y”, which stood for “Yank” — throw away the current page of memory and read in the next page (if there is one). If you panic and exit at that point, your first 40K or so of text is gone for good.
So, a smart young systems programmer named Dave Downs wrote the first screen-oriented text editor I ever used, which he creatively named ”EDIT”. It filled the entire screen with text, and used control and arrow keys for commands and navigation. It was user-friendly, but it did not implement any form of paging, so you were limited to about 750 lines of text in any file. Doug Helton and I made a few modifications to that editor — the uncommented assembly code was not nearly as user-friendly as the editor it comprised.
Then Data General came out with a screen-oriented editor called SED (not the same as the Unix utility). It did do paging and was extremely user-friendly, except that it was dog slow. It also performed a lot of unnecessary screen repaints, as you could plainly see when dialed in over a 110-baud modem.
When I took a job working on DEC equipment, I was introduced to KED on the PDP-11, followed by its big brother EDT on RSX and VMS. I became quite good at EDT macros, and thought that would be the last text editor I’d ever need.
In 1984, I was introduced to my first Unix variant, Altos Xenix. It had no EDT-like editor. The only screen-oriented editor was vi. At first, I shuddered at the thought that different keystrokes meant different things depending on your current mode. You couldn’t just walk up to a keyboard that was already in vi and know exactly what your next keystroke might do (or undo). But I soon got used to it, and learned to love it. It’s very fast and responsive, and you can do a lot with only a few keystrokes once you know what you’re doing – without reaching for function keys, numeric keypad, arrows, or a mouse. I continued to use vi for many years on different Unix platforms, and even when I started developing for MS-DOS and Windows, I used the MKS Toolkit version of vi for a couple of years.
Then I was tempted by the allure of graphical interfaces and the promises of syntax highlighting. I found WinEdit, and customized it for the language I used most at that time. A year or so later, I discovered SlickEdit at the SD West Conference. I was so impressed with its flexibility and capability for customization, that I helped to convince Synergex to adopt it as their IDE on Windows. They have since integrated their compilation engine into SlickEdit to create a highly intelligent user interface for programming Synergy/DE. I also used it for all the other languages in which I program, because it comes with customizations for almost any syntax you can imagine — C, C++, Delphi, Ruby, PHP, Perl, JavaScript, HTML, XML, etc.
But recently, I’ve fallen out of love with SlickEdit. It’s too slow starting up, and all that intelligence takes some horsepower. Sometimes it will hang for a moment or two while it parses an XSD or looks up a structure in the Synergy Repository — whether I asked it to or not. To do everything on the keyboard requires a lot of control and function keys, along with a good memory — so I end up reaching for the mouse a lot. And sometimes, the syntax highlighting gets confused by alternate usage like nested /* comments in Delphi. Incorrect syntax highlighting is worse than no syntax highlighting at all. SlickEdit also requires a license key to be entered whenever it is installed — which happens every time I upgrade Synergy/DE. The final straw came when I swapped out my last 32-bit Windows development system. SlickEdit isn’t available in a 64-bit Windows version yet, and the 32-bit version runs even slower under 64-bit Vista than it did on slower hardware under 32-bit XP.
Of course I’ve used other editors on Windows. Visual Studio gives you half the features at half the speed. There are Notepad+ and SciTE, which look interesting but don’t present anything fascinating enough to draw me in. Besides, they’re still trapped in 32-bit land on Windows, too.
So I decided to go back to my best love, who has since gotten all dressed up for the occasion: vim. She’s available in a Win64 version. She sports a ton of new features, but she’s still just as responsive as ever. I slipped into working with her like I’d only left her yesterday (in fact, I’ve continued to use vi occasionally on Unix, so I haven’t forgotten too much).
Now all I need to do is code up vim’s syntax highlighting for Synergy/DE.
Posted in Geek Meditations, Wildly popular | 
103 Comments » RSS 2.0 | Sphere it!
Subscribe by Email
Ah, vim, how I love thee, let me count the ways
1. your syntax highlighting is much awesomeness
2. your responsiveness is always high and you are never sluggish even when you should be
3. while my own command of your keystroke commands is limited, I am constantly in awe of what I learn and know
I could go on and on and on, but I won’t.
I’m surprised you’d never used emacs. I tried it once and ran away crying.
Nice ode to vim, Joseph. No, I’ve never tried emacs, although the idea of an editor with embedded Lisp does have its attraction. Maybe someday.
The concept of the Lisp integration sounds great, but the default behavior of EMACS is beyond painful — and I don’t want to have to essentially write my own editor within the editor to get the editor I want. If I was going to do that, I’d just write it from scratch.
You know, you could just use emacs and have all of those editors a few keystrokes away!
I’ll have to give emacs a look. But I really don’t want all those editors, I just want one good one. Vim is working out well for me.
Well, y’know, I’ve heard that EMACS is a great OS that lacks a decent editor, but that’s not really a fair characterization. After all, EMACS comes with an excellent editor called Viper mode.
*snork*
Yes, vim rocks. I have been using it for about a year now and learn new stuff every day.
One thing bugs me though: The concept of cognitive dissonance. I suspect I like vim so much, because after investing all this time learning how to use it, I don’t want to admit that I have wasted my time.
What’s so great about vim? I’m not sure. So much to configure. So much to figure out. Regexes at your fingertips? Other editors do that too… Ever tried to use the ctags feature with a non-us keyboard? (e.g. a swiss german keyboard – the key bindings don’t seem to work…)
But at least I am having fun
Part of what makes a relationship valuable is the time and effort you put into it.
But I know what you mean. One thing that kept me on vi for so long the first time was the amount of engineering I had put into customizing it for my environment.
I think what’s great about vim is that it doesn’t get in your way. You know that there’s probably an even faster way to do whatever it is you’re doing — but the way you already know is fast enough. Much faster than the lumbering graphical editors in most IDEs.
“Doesn’t get in my way” is quite possibly the biggest concern I have when choosing a tool for productivity. Vim (along with other vi-like editors) has consistently proven to fit such criteria better than any other editor.
What’s amazing is how fast it is, and how quickly you can make multiple complex modifications. Many editors have one or the other, but few have both.
I’ve discovered that, for my purposes, the best way to use Vim is essentially in default configuration. My .vimrc is extremely simple.
Time invested . . . ? Almost nothing, other than the time spent learning to use it in the first place. That time was well spent, because I’m far more productive with Vim than I ever have been with any non-vi editor.
I went back and looked at the .exrc file I had developed about 15 years ago on a Unix system where I connected using a VT-220. It took me a while to even understand some of it, but it mostly consisted of key mappings for the VT’s function keys to some of my more frequently-needed multiple actions. I had one key mapped to “write changes, put the file into source control, move to next”, while the key right beside it was mapped to “release source-control lock, discard changes and move to next”. Of course, I also had a key to lock the file and change read-only state — as well as “diff against source control”. That way, I could make a whole boat-load of changes and when I was done I could quickly review and check in the ones that I really needed.
Right now, my .vimrc only has auto-indent, smartcase, and syntax highlighting enabled.
My .vimrc (though I’m considering removing that “syntax on” line):
set nocompatible
set autoindent
set backspace=indent,eol,start
set history=50
set nomodeline
set ruler
syntax on
:abbr s# /***************************************************************
:abbr e# ***************************************************************/
. . . but I think I may be adding “set ignorecase” and “set smartcase”, now that I think about it.
And I just added your backspace, history, and ruler settings. Thanks!
No problem at all.
I used to use vim for editing, but I have since moved to emacs. I am still more proficient in vim, but emacs is more fully-featured.
I don’t know which one I _like_ better, but I do think that emacs _is_ better because of Lisp. I’m sure the transition will happen soon, and I’ll be way better in emacs than vim.
You may be right — and I’ll have to learn emacs someday in order to compare. Have you ever seen this?
Whatever was on the other end of that link appears to have vanished now.
One of these days, I may implement a Vim-alike in Lisp, with an m-expression (with optional s-expression) configuration syntax. There’s really no reason something like Vim can’t provide the same lispy goodness as EMACS without having to carry around the EMACS badness as well (EMACS stands for Esc+Meta+Alt+Ctrl+Shift, y’know), other than the fact that it hasn’t been done (well) yet.
Well, vim can already be built to be scripted with MzScheme (along with Tcl, Perl, Python, and Ruby), so I expect any Lisp flavor should be doable following that model.
I just realised I’ve been using emacs for everything for 20 years now – a thesis, a book, numerous articles – on Windows, Unix, Solaris, MacOS, OS X. I do use a nice angled keyboard and have funny-shaped little fingers, but emacs really does do the job well.
Do you ever have trouble remembering all the key combinations for shortcuts?
I have some troubles remembering the lesser used key chords, but emacs will auto help you there. You can call almost every command by Meta-x which it will execute and then let you know what chord that is bound to.
Also M-x describe-mode, will list all the ’special’ chords for a buffer based on its mode. I love emacs, but have heard vim spoken of with similar awe (except by emacs junkies, who revile all editors not emacs).
I <3 Emacs
I’ll definitely give emacs a look, but for now I’m basking in my return to vi*
I use emacs as well… however, I don’t use it’s advanced features, if you will.
I just love it for C — it ain’t so good with assembly. I basically only use the save, search, goto line, and replace keys… but I love it.
Wow, all that power at your fingertips going to waste.
That’s sort of like using the wizard’s spellbook as a booster seat, isn’t it?
I tend to believe that when it comes to a programmer’s text editor, it’s really more subjective than most people tend to realize. Of course there are differences in level of quality, but much of the time it’s more a matter of personal preference/style- One specific text editor will resonate with you in such a way as to create the feeling that it is vastly superior to all the others.
Which is why I’m not going to say “mine’s better, pick mine!” or anything like that. I’ll just say that the one that resonates with me to a stronger degree than any other really is textpad, for the simple reason that the ease with which it lets you add an external tool and run it against a currently open file- For instance, you can setup “ctrl+1″ to run the currently open python script, and output will be captured in the bottom-pane- REALLY helps to test-as-you-go. I didn’t see it on the list of text editors you tried before hitting VIM, so I’ll just say that if you ever find yourself looking for more of a windows-app (ooh, flamebait) so you can drag/drop files into it, or copy/paste to/from it and other applications (not sure if VIM, which is console based as I understand it, makes that easy or possible), I’d recommend taking a crack at textpad.
Thanks for the tip, Alex. Vim comes in two flavors: the console app and gvim, which is a Windows app. I tend to prefer the console version myself (it feels like home) but for those who are used to standard Windows behaviors and want to get to know vim, gvim is a good place to start.
actually there is a graphical VIM for *Nix as well, which I could of sworn was also gvim (which I always thought stood for Gnome VIM since gvim was the default in the Gnome DE).
I always thought it stood for graphical but it does use GTK+ so I guess it could stand for one of the three.
There’s also gvim for mac, but you’d want to get the one using MacPorts rather than downloading it from macvim. One it’s more up to date, and two it just seems to work better.
Although I just checked and it looks like macvim has gotten a new lease on life so I’ll have to check that out at some point.
It does stand for “graphical”.
I prefer console-based Vim, as well — in part because gvim doesn’t give me anything Unix console-based Vim doesn’t, except for stuff that just gets in my way, and in part because of the pasting behavior on Unix-like systems. Of course, on an MS Windows system, the pasting behavior difference doesn’t matter, since there’s no such thing as a middle-click past in MS Windows.
While looking through the scripting interfaces for vim, I noticed that on Windows you can even automate vim as an OLE automation server. What an unholy marriage! I presume that uses gvim, and probably means that gvim carries around the extra baggage required for the OLE dispatch interface.
Just the thought of IDispatch in all its gory lurking somewhere within the bowels of vim makes me ill.
I think I just threw up a little in the back of my throat.
Definitely triggers my gag reflex.
actually in PuTTY I (think I) can middle-click paste, although generally I just right click in the console window.
You can paste in the contents of another file even more easily in Vim than by dragging and dropping, as long as you’re using it in a terminal emulator within an X session. There are a number of ways to do this sort of thing, but my usual approach is to shell out to the xclip utility, which allows me to middle-click paste into the open document.
On MS Windows, of course, that doesn’t work so well — but then, on MS Windows, I’d be using gvim instead of standard console-based Vim, so you can do drag-and-drop stuff with it if you really want to.
If you have text on the clipboard in Windows, just make sure you’re in insert mode in vim, and from the console’s system menu select Edit->Paste.
If you’re not in insert mode, it can be pretty entertaining.
Way too much work. I’ll stick with Unix, thanks.
actually, if you’re in insert mode, all you have to do is right click, not sure if that works in gvim on Windows but it works in cmd mode vim.
What — like the right-click context menu? Too many clicks.
No, like just right-clicking and whatever text is in the clipboard gets pasted automagically.
Brilliant! It does require “Quick Edit Mode” to be set in the console’s properties — but I’m starting to prefer that anyway.
quick edit mode?
Isn’t everything a ‘quick edit’ with vim? :p
On the console window, pull down the system menu (upper left) and pick “Properties”. On the first tab, “Quick Edit Mode” is a checkbox. With that enabled, right-click will paste.
Oh, this is an MS Windows thing? I thought he was saying he didn’t know whether it worked in MS Windows, but it works with a console-based Vim on Unix-like systems, or something like that. The whole time, I was thinking “What? Since when?”
Yes, I think when Joseph said “cmd mode vim” he meant running under cmd.exe. Right, Joseph?
You are correct, sorry I wasn’t clearer.
I think you are going the wrong way.
Vim and emacs are naturally the number 1 contenders for an editor, but this will mean all the graphical editors will lose out…
I for one think that graphical editors are better. They just havent fully reached their possibilities, because they either lack many features, or they become SLOW…. (and yes, gvim sucks, its just sugar around vim…)
I beg to disagree — I think graphical editors have pretty much reached their maximum potential (except for adding non-graphical features). Keystrokes are much more precise than mouse clicks, and programming is still done in text last time I checked.
Agreed.
No GUI editor has ever given me anywhere near the productivity support that Vim has. I really dislike EMACS, but even if is far more productivity-enhancing than any GUI editor, or any console based editor that tries to act like a GUI editor for that matter.
To a programmer, the text editor you use is not a matter of religion. It’s much stronger than that. It’s more like love
You apparently have a very low view of religion. I stake my eternal destiny on my religion — my editor just gets some of my temporal attention. Oh, I argue editors like anyone else, but something tells me you didn’t put much thought into what this statement should mean.
-Josh-
If your eternal destiny depends on whether you’re a Baptist, Methodist, or something else, then I sincerely hope you made the right choice.
In my mind, the person you choose to spend your life with is a far weightier decision than what church, synagogue, temple or mosque you attend (or don’t).
Oh, and yes — my choice of editor is more important to me than my speculations on something I cannot prove or disprove.
Can you prove or disprove which editor is better to you?
No, but I can prove that editors exist and that experimenting with them will help me to choose one that meets my needs. I suppose you’ll say that experimenting with faith leads you to what you need there. More power to you. As for me, it only led to fruitless disappointment.
In my mind, the person you choose to spend your life with is a far weightier decision than what church, synagogue, temple or mosque you attend (or don’t).Thanks for the more-civil-than-expected replies!
I find this comment most interesting. As a person who uses my spiritual convictions as the foundation for my worldview, even the person I spend my life with is chosen with respect to my religious conviction. Marriage makes no sense without alignment on those things in life that are most important, eh? (my wife *does* use Emacs too)
If there really is a truth out there, and it’s as big as what religion claims, then it should really be the basis of every other decision.
For some reason, I do think that choice of text editor is very little informed by my faith
. (I think this one is adiophora)
-Josh-
No problem, Josh. I am actually more offended by condescending atheists than by fundamentalist theists — because the former should know better than to presume to absolute knowledge.
I was once a devout Christian, and I have experienced a meaningful faith. That faith gradually lost much of its meaning for me, and now seems largely irrelevant. But I don’t begrudge the meaning that others may attach to their own similar (or different) experiences.
When it comes to making decisions, we all choose what appears to us to matter. If faith matters more to you, then that will be your guiding principle. I suppose I still have a type of faith that guides me, though I leave it almost completely undefined — and I don’t associate it with religion.
Oh, and I appreciate your use of a Greek term (adiophora). I studied Greek when I majored in Biblical Literature, and I’ve always loved that language.
One more thing — if your wife has a use for a decent text editor, whether emacs or vim, then you sir are truly blessed.
Too true!
My SigO’s metaphysical belief system is not the same as mine.
My SigO’s ethical beliefs are substantially similar to mine, however.
My SigO generally prefers the same editors I do, including Vim (and if I’m not mistaken, it’s her favorite editor for most purposes, as it is mine).
My SigO and I agree, however, that organized religion is just a way for people to identify with other people over shared beliefs, and is nowhere near as important as the beliefs themselves. As Sterling put it, it doesn’t matter what church, synagogue, temple, or mosque you attend — but I’ll add to it to say that the reason it doesn’t matter is that the beliefs you hold dear (your spiritual philosophy) are not the same as the organization with which you identify (your religion).
. . . and as long as our ethics are compatible, divergence in our spiritual belief systems in no way gets in the way of a close, enduring relationship that enriches both our lives.
That’s an excellent posture for our world in which few things can be taken for certain.
Some people, however, make certainty on points of dogma a core principle of their belief system. For them, compatibility with someone who does not hold those same beliefs is problematic at best. Too bad, because it’s a manufactured problem. I have enough naturally occurring ones for my life.
I know what you mean, from experience, unfortunately.
You didn’t test Notepad++ didn’t you? It’s 1000x better than Notepad+
Also try Aptana Studio or BlueFish.
I’ll give them a look. Thanks, Josue.
Nope, it’s because vim is so ridiculously great.
Amen. (:
Ditto.
Hi Sterling,
Way to go
I’ve used a variety of editors as well and as of last year I settled on Vim and have been very happy.
I had used emacs for some time prior to vim, and I absolutely don’t look back at all. The fact that emacs allows Lisp scripting is little consolation due to the dialect and poor primitives – see for example Steve Yegge’s post about wasting a lot of time writing a simple emacs macro. If Yegee, who’s an emacs fanatic and smart programmer, has trouble with it, that’s bad news.
Vim’s scripting language is nice and clean, plus you can script it in Ruby, Python, etc! Imho it is far better than emacs.
I _way_ prefer the feel of it too, after having used emacs for long.
You can script it in Ruby?! O. M. G.
Thanks, Gustavo!
Imho the most important feature that gVim lacks is the Tabs. If it have had tabs it would be much more easier to use gVim. I think in the 21th century tabbed browsing is must have feature for all kind of text editors and word processors.
It’s got a form of tabs, but it’s also present in vim. You can open multiple files at once and using :p or :n you can “tab” through your open documents. I do it all the time when working on websites.
You can also use panes instead of tabs, which I generally find much more useful than tab-like behavior.
I run out of screen space too quickly — even on 1900 x 1200. I often have 20-odd source files open at once, though. Tabbing works well for that. I can gt through them faster than I could reach for a mouse and click on a tab in a graphical editor.
Stuff that doesn’t need to be in the same Vim instance gets opened in a separate terminal emulator, for me — and different projects that require more than one terminal emulator get separate workspaces. I don’t want everything in a single window (even with tabs) most of the time, because I don’t want to have to spend too long cycling through the tabs, and I don’t want to have to use my mouse in the case of GUI tabs.
. . . but I already know I’m not normal.
I start a new vim instance half the time, and open in another tab half the time. It all depends whether I’m already at the command prompt or already in vim.
You could always just shell out — maybe something like:
:! urxvt -e vim &
I haven’t tried that, so no guarantees.
If I’m already in vim, I just do a :tabe newfile
When I’m at the prompt, I do v newfile (v.bat does a ’start vim’ with the same arguments)
. . . except that opens a tab, rather than a new instance. You mentioned that whether you open a tab or a new instance tends to depend on whether your hands are on the keyboard or the mouse, so I pointed out you don’t need to touch the mouse to open a new instance.
Oh, yeah . . . and I have a keyboard shortcut set to open a terminal emulator anyway, so my hands basically don’t leave the keyboard when working in Vim at all, unless I’m pasting something in from a GUI application.
No, it depends on whether I’m in vim or at the command prompt. I’m trying to forget where my mouse is.
Sorry — I misstated myself.
Err, anyway, I was basically just referring to the fact that you don’t need to be outside of vim to send commands to the shell.
Sure, I’ve used :! in vi ever since I was first introduced to it 24 years ago.
there _are_ tabs in vim. just use :tabe to open a tab, “gt” to go the next, “gT” to go to the previous tab.
As mentioned by someone else above, that’s a new feature in vim 7. But hey, it’s free, so go download it!
[...] To all the editors I’ve loved before… – Sterling Camden ‘ To a programmer, the text editor you use is not a matter of religion. It’s much stronger than that. It’s more like love ‘ [...]
I don’t know why, but I’ve used Textpad since… 1999? Holy crap.
Maybe it is religious.
Nine years? It might be true love instead.
I’m a huge Vim fan, as you know, Sterling.
Recently, though, I’ve been trying to use nvi all the time instead of Vim. I eventually came to realize that, all things considered, syntax highlighting actually gets in my way more than it helps — so the fact nvi doesn’t support syntax highlighting yet doesn’t really give me any trouble to speak of.
I’m also keen on the fact that nvi is a smaller application, and is distributed under the BSD license instead of Vim’s annoying double-licensing option.
I’m not sure I’m going to stick with nvi, though. There are annoying little things about nvi that bother me — things that Vim supports and nvi doesn’t.
With my main dev systems being Windows Vista (I know… cry for me), the memory footprint of vim seems ridiculously small for the power it provides. I don’t think vim’s licensing will get in my way at all — I’m not planning to incorporate it into any product for resale. What about the license gives you pause?
I’ll do better than that — I’ll weep, wail, and gnash teeth. I won’t go quite so far as to tear at my clothing and hair, though.
It’s not copyfree enough for me.
Maybe you can talk to the vim folks about their licensing and suggest they go copyfree? I’m sure if enough people got behind such a move, they might at least consider it.
I don’t see it happening, considering what Vim currently uses as its licensing — to say nothing of the fact that it probably includes contributed code from dozens of coders by now, making a license change kind of impractical.
[...] To all the editors I’ve loved before -Â stoking the text editor wars for page views. [...]
Editors can be a religion, but they are also a tool. When the tool becomes less useful, even the most devout can change. I work for a company which was originally a VMS house. The editor of choice was standard TPU. No intellisense, no color, no nonsense. As we expanded to include Unix, we needed a new editor. JED became the editor of choice because it supported all our platforms, including VMS, and had editing modes which act like TPU or act like EMACS so people with both backgrounds could use the same editor with ease. Since it is based on an interpreted version of c called s-lang, we were able to teach it very basic Synergy syntax highlighting.
Over time the PC caught on and every developer turned in their VaxStation for a Windows 95 PC. The editor of choice in that era was CodeWright. We developed a PVCS integration tool which managed revision control and semi-automated changelog documentation. We wrote a wrapper around the compiler tools to automate the builds. We also taught it basic syntax highlighting.
Then Synergex began to offer Workbench based on SlickEdit. The intellisense was so much better than the basic stuff and we did not have to keep up with the changes in the language syntax. After porting our macros from CodeWright to SlickEdit, all other editors were forgotten. That is, until the latest version… I absolutely love the powerful intellisense the current version has, but open a 2500 line source the whole thing grinds to a halt for 45 seconds while it tries to figure out what to do. Like Chip, sometimes I just want the text without the bloat.
Now my job requires me to split between Synergy and C#, some XML, and some SQL. For the quick view of files we are hooked on Notepad2, an open source editor with simple syntax highlighting of several languages. It is great for the quick edit or the code review where you don’t need the full syntax engine. Now if someone would only teach it how to color my Synergy code!!
Thanks for your comment, Richard. It’s nice to hear from another Synergy user here. I haven’t tried Notepad2, but now that back in vim full speed, it would be hard to switch to anything else. I’ve started coding the syntax highlighting for Synergy/DE, but I haven’t gotten very far.
There’s a Vim Intellisense now, by the way — if you want it. I don’t care for such a thing, so I haven’t given it a try, but I rather suspect it’s not as much a drag on performance as Intellisense in certain other code editors.
Interesting. Mostly Intellisense seems to get in the way — except when I can’t remember the parameters to a function. If I ever get around to checking it out, I’ll report back. Thanks.
I suggest taking a look at Zeus – http://www.zeusedit.com/
It has lots of IDE features but still feels like a snappy text editor.
Interesting, but it’s apparently only on Windows.
Do you happen to have a Synergy/DE syntax highlighting file for vim that you are willing to share?
I’m working on one, Jacob. If I ever get it even most of the way done, I’ll post it on chipstips.com.