Yes, VIM is good

I've been catching up on some of my back episodes of .NET Rocks the past couple of days. I'm currently about 3 months behind on my podcasts, so I've got plenty to listen to.

Anyway, I was listening to show 537 with James Kovacs at the gym this morning, and he mentioned something interesting toward the end. When asked what he's been into lately, he said he'd been playing with Vim. Imagine that - a hard-core Microsoft guy playing with Vim. That just gives me a good feeling.

I've always been frustrated by how people in the Windows world seem to think "text editor" equals "Windows Notepad". Even experienced people. You always hear them refer to opening something in Notepad, or typing things into Notepad, etc. This from people who've been in the business for 10, 15, or even 20 or more years! I mean, they must be aware that there are better editors out there. Is "notepad" just used as a generic term, a shorter version of "text editor"? I wish somebody would explain that to me.

But getting back to the topic, it was nice to see James mention Vim. Despite Carl's and Richard's comments about VI being an antique, Vim really is remarkably powerful. Granted, it takes some effort to learn, but once you've got it down, you can do some pretty complicated stuff in just a couple of keystrokes. It's always nice to see that MS A-listers can recognize the power of tools like Vim, and not just us transplanted UNIX geeks.

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