Comment by evoxed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evoxed | Hacker News Reader

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I'm curious, but what's your workflow re: Obj-C development? I only dabble, and for me the vim-xcode bindings are enough but mainly because I don't find myself on the command line much during an XCode session. The built-in shortcuts are all easy enough so that I don't have to use the mouse much either except to use interface builder.

Second, can you share a little on your #4? Aside from the aforementioned Obj-C dabbling, I use vim for almost everything. There are so many awesome plugins that do just about everything I could ask for and therefore I have yet to do any plugin writing myself. Having seen the usual complaints around VimL, what's the deal with external scripting support? I compiled with +python and +ruby since that's what I'm familiar with for plugins, scripts, etc. and a few plugins I have did require one or the other but are there any downsides? Most of t-pope's plugins appear to be straight VimL which makes me wonder.

Apologies for being an idiot, but I'd certainly appreciate some enlightenment.

It is less about the command line, and more about being able to use all of Vim's shortcuts and commands. I am magnitudes faster moving through a big code base in Vim than in Xcode. Even the split window support in Xcode sucks. Apart from that I find Xcode bloated and slow. Back in the Xcode 3 days, the speed was reasonable, but with 4 it became slow. Even worse, if you're on battery, Xcode's constant indexing and whatnot will drain the battery really fast. I've just made the switch to 100% vim a week ago, so far everything feels way better, and coding is so much more fun, but I guess I need more time to really assess it.

For plugins, I think it is simply a case for familiarity. If you already know Python and its packages or Ruby and its library inside out, learning another new language, which has no use outside of Vim might seem like not worth it.

Sublime does have a really strong plugin ecosystem, and I reason that this is because it is so much easier to write a new plugin for something that irks you if you don't have to learn a completely new language first. Also, the plugin quality should be better because obviously when you use python every day, the quality of your code is higher than when you just learned VimL and only learned it for this one plugin.

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