In the end… Vim is Amazing

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I've been working with SubEthaEdit a lot in the last few days, and also with BBEdit, trying to get the few features that I don't like fixed/cleared up, and while I really like both of these editors for their unique approach to the problem of a developer's editor, there is a lot to be said for Vim. I have done more coding in Vim than probably any other editor in my life. I've used it on so many systems it's amazing, and I've never had to compile it myself. There seems to be someone who's already figured out how to get it to work on every platform I've needed. The community support is really amazing.

I have been using the Vim package from macvim.org, and it's currently at 7.0.224 for Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger). I am able to use all the nice fonts, syntax highlighting, everything that I expect in Vim, just on my Mac. The only problem is that it's stuck in Vim's view of the world. That means you can't have multiple windows open on the same application instance. On Unix this isn't an issue because you typically start a Vim session from the command line, but on Mac OS X, it's a limitation that I find... well... annoying, and it makes me not use it as much as I might.

There are also several things that the other two do that are very nice that Vim misses out on. It's not horrible, but when given the choice, I really end up using SubEthaEdit and BBEdit more on my Mac than I do Vim. But it's close. Many of the requests I have in to the SubEthaEdit developers and BBEdit developers are things in Vim that I wish they'd do - or do better.

Still... I can't complain. Vim has been very very good to me and I hope they come out with a Leopard release (Mac OS 10.5) very soon so I can upgrade my laptop to it and keep Vim with me.