I don’t think I’ve extolled the virtues of vim, but it’s my favorite text editor by far. Whenever I’m in something that’s NOT vim, I can feel the pain.
What should take 3-4 keystrokes involves mousing and an excessive amount. Auto-indent, appropriate tab stops, shift widths, all that stuff is touch and go depending on the IDE and the time you want to take to configure it.
With vim, I sit in a .vimrc, set everything up the way I want it, and never deal with trivialities like that again.
Lately I’ve been stuck in PL/SQL-land – a chunk of new development in Oracle Time and Labor and some Pricing procedures I’ve been trying to optimize. I’ve been using TOAD, but I actually hate TOAD with most of my black little heart. Its Find functionality is spotty at best, and the amount of keystrokes/navigation is a pain in the butt even when you’re using hotkeys and bookmarks.
The newer version’s code folding is nice, but clutters the screen to a great extent.
The biggest pain, though, is just knowing it’s so damn inefficient when compared to a real text editor.
I’ve had 2-3 times in the last week where I realized a set of code should be sitting in an IF/ELSE construct. In vim it’s typing IF blah THEN, tapping j, then >>, then . for every line I need indented. Takes about 3 seconds tops. In TOAD I have to navigate, tab, then go to the beginning of the next line, hit tab, etc. ad nauseam.
So, naturally I want to use vim. I don’t want to be alt-tabbing and copy/pasting into TOAD to compile, however; I want to just compile in vim with :make.
Lo and behold:
The Answer To My Problem
This is awesome. I got it working today after an hour or so of fiddling with it. I would consider this my greatest accomplishment this week.
My boss would be enraged to hear it, I’m sure.
“You have deadlines!”
Yeah, I do.
And now that I’m vimming it up for PL/SQL, I’ll meet them easily.
