Totally Blown Away by MacVim
I've been a big fan of vi and Vim for a while. I started using it back in grad school and it's been on any Unix system (or Windows for that matter) that I've ever come across. Mac OS X has shipped with it in the 'console' mode since it came out, and yet they haven't spent the time to make it really a Cocoa app - and it's understandable. Priorities.
So when I came across the Vim for Mac OS X web site I was really jazzed. They had, essentially, gvim for Mac OS X. Nice. There were several things that kept me from using it full-time on the Mac and those were primarily limitations in gvim itself - to have multiple windows you had to have multiple gvim instances. But then today I was checking to see if the Vim for Mac OS X web site had an update from the 7.0.224 it's had for a while, and I went to the Vim wiki and it led me to MacVim.
Amazing. Nothing short of brilliant and stunning.
This guy, has put gVim to the level of a regular Mac OS X text editor. Multiple windows in the same running application instance... tabs to show multiple file buffers in the same window... transparency on the windows - it's amazing! It's a complete Mac app, but it's Vim!
I can leave it running without a window open, I can open multiple files in a window - open multiple windows, Cmd-W to close the window... it's everything that I had hoped for in Vim and it's working on Mac OS X now. It's even got code to check for updates! This is without a doubt the way to enjoy Vim on the Mac.
UPDATE: OK... I'm about as jazzed as I've been in a long time. This release of MacVim is amazing! For BBEdit, I built etags and get them into the Makefiles of a few projects. While it's not perfect because it'd be very difficult to be able to determine the context of the method invocation, for a lot of things, tags are really useful. It's nice to be able to jump around the code easily without having to move your hands from the keyboard. I guess that's the thing I like most about Vim - it's all Old School - just like me.