Systura Where information becomes knowledge...

My favorite editor for a while has been jEdit.  It is Java based and would run on any platform, because of Java, but one day when I needed to run jEdit, it just would not run on my Windows machine.  I ended up removing jEdit, re-installing Java, and then re-installing jEdit before everything started working again.

After that point, I did some soul searching and chosen a different editor for now.  I have chosen Vim.  Why?  Well, this is finally an editor that works everywhere.  Yes, jEdit will run on just about every platform that I need jEdit to run on, but jEdit does require a window system; like Microsoft Windows, OS X, KDE, or Gnome, etc.  I did find myself having to edit files on some systems without a window system; like an ssh session.  When I find myself on a non-window system, I find myself running Vim, so I decided to see what was available for Windows and OS X.  For Windows, there is gVim.  While gVim may not look as slick as jEdit, gVim does have all the functionality of Vim.  For OS X, there is MacVim.  MacVim looks really slick and works a lot better than gVim in Windows - MacVim is better integrated into OS X, than gVim is integrated into Windows, both are very good implementations of Vim.

As I am using Vim more and more, I am become more appreciative of Vim and the power of Vim.  I am also learning more and more about Vim, which will make me better when I need to use Vim from the command line on some remote system where I have to tweak the configuration.  I have even started playing with the Vim scripting language to assist me creating a new configuration file and the scripting language was pretty straight forward and easy to understand.

So far, so good.  Learning more about an editor that I have used for a long time, but never really considered Vim for my windows environments until now.