Chris: do you use an IDE?
Chris: and if so which one?
Zachary: um, I generally use vim:-P
Chris: gah

Vim is a great text editor. It’s a step up from Ed which is the standard text editor. I started using Vim five years ago. That was about the time that I discovered secure shell, and I started administering servers and other computers remotely. It turns out that Vim was the best text editor over a secure shell session, and since most of my machines ran Mac OS X at the time, Emacs was a terrible option. (I’m not really sure what you call Emacs on Mac OS X. You probably shouldnt’ call it Emacs.) I limped along using very basic Vim functionality over secure shell for a while. Then I discovered a useful graphical tutorial for Vim, and it became considerably more useful.

Now I use Vim because every other text editor or word processor is slower and requires the use of a mouse. (Gah!) I write most of my documents in LaTeX using Vim. I read my email in Mutt and compose emails in Vim. I use Vim almost exclusively to edit code and configuration files on my workstations and servers which works well because it does a good job of syntax highlighting and smart indentation.

A few years ago, I wouldn’t have thought I’d be using Vim exclusively, and it was somewhat by accident that I switched, but now that I am using it, I would be unable to go back.

<Esc> :set paste
<paste all you want>
<Esc> :set nopaste

It’s such a simple solution for a problem that has annoyed me for quite a while.