I spent a large chunk of 2 days bashing out some code for asLJ, which is in a mix of Applescript Studio and Objective-C all pieced together with its GUI in Xcode. While I don’t dislike Xcode’s text editor—in fact, I have had moments where I really liked it and wondered about using it for everything—I discovered that the past few months with MacVim/gVim/Vim have gotten me much more into the power of Vim. Moving around through the code felt slow. Systematic changes were annoying (simple find-replace isn’t so bad, if not as quick to do as in Vim, but changing “[thing1],[thing2],” to “[thing2],[thing1],” for various values of thing1 and thing2 on numerous lines was a bunch of mouse-keyboard-mixed hackery instead of a single well-constructed command.
There aren’t a whole lot of little details like that for me to point to and say “see? Vim is better!” Ultimately, what it comes down to is that I am eager to have to do something like PHP programming or web site maintenance for which I’ll use Vim.
