Vim is great. Despite its steep learning curve , it has many advantages and many loyal Vim followers will tell you that you should force yourself to use it.
Personally I started using Vim when I was ssh-ing into the group servers or into my computer in department. In such scenarios, I could not open the IDEs with the nice GUIs 🙁 However, as time passed, Vim started to grow on me. Now, I can list a few reasons why I think it is great, for example, it requires a small amount of memory to run, has a short start up time and can handle large files pretty well.
Although, I am definitely not a Vim expert, I will tell you about some of the things I have added to my .vimrc. The .vimrc file is very handy for containing all your favourite settings, such as key mappings, custom commands, formatting and syntax highlighting. The file uses vimscript which is a programming language in itself. However, there is a lot of help online that tells you with what lines to add to your .vimrc. I would recommend installing Vundle which is a Vim plugin manager.
Here I will list some cool things that I have discovered you can do with your .vimrc. It has certainly made my life a bit nicer.
- Code Folding
Most IDEs provide a way to collapse functions and classes that results in only seeing the function/class definition and hiding the code. To do this in Vim add the following lines to your.vimrc" Enable folding set foldmethod=indent set foldlevel=99 " Enable folding with the spacebar nnoremap <space> za
Alternatively, you can install the Vim plugin SimpylFold. - Python indentation
Vim does not do auto indention like many IDEs. To automatically do PEP-8 indentation for Python, add the following to your .vimrc .
" PEP indentation au BufNewFile,BufRead *.py \ set tabstop=4 \ set softtabstop=4 \ set shiftwidth=4 \ set textwidth=79 \ set expandtab \ set autoindent \ set fileformat=unix
You can also install the Vim plugin vim-flake8 which is a static syntax and style checker for Python source code. It shows errors in a quickfix window and lets you jump to their location inside your code.
- Turn line numbers on
Rather than typing in:set nu
every time you open your files. You can always have them turned on by adding :set nu to your.vimrc - Autocompletion
When I switch from PyCharm to Vim I feel a bit lost without the autocompletion however, after a quick search I found many are using the Vim package Youcompleteme and it is awesome.
