vi, and its more recent clone vim, is a tool that has a 30 year legacy and is still gaining new users. In our January Git session; upon committing code at the terminal, vi launched and confounded many of us. It was decided, by the group, to arrange a session on vim. It transpired that Agile Staffordshire already has a number of vim users of varying competency.
Introduction
To begin, I will introduce vim and some of the basic features and ‘modes’ for simple editing. This is designed as a ‘noob-to-noob’ session. I have only been using vim for about 6 months and will be figuratively ‘a page ahead’ of the learner. I will explain some of the differences between standard GUI editors and some of advantages of the vim ‘way of things’.
Further vim
Jason Underhill will continue the session with some additional features; these include:
• Spell check
• Code formatting
• Regular expressions
• searchBuffers, windows and tabs
Plug-ins will also be introduced, demonstrating vim’s extensible architecture, some of which; Ctrl-P, Surround, SuperTab, Endwise and Markdown.
Alternative IDE
Consider notch turned up! Paul Williams will demonstrate why more developers are moving from full-blown IDEs to ‘legacy’ editors, such as vim. He will demonstrate a full terminal workflow using vim and tmux, automatic unit test execution and using a Clojure REPL. Imagine Repl + Test Driven Development without an IDE!
Tooling Up
This will be a practical session, so bring your laptops. Most operating systems have vim available; either installed or via a package manager. The notable exception is Microsoft(R) Windows(R). Visit vim download page. Wi-Fi Internet access has been provided by Staffordshire University in prior events and I expect they will be kind and do it again.
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