Mine started with a bunch of IDEs like MSVC, Anjuta, Eclipse, Winefish and Bluefish, interspersed with short bursts of Vim and Emacs every now and then, but that didn't stick. I used anything and everything, really. Those days were spent in a plethora of activities ranging from LaTeX to PHP to Matlab to C++. But again, nothing stuck, really.
Then Textmate. My first big text editor that I invested time in. Textmate proved to be immensely powerful for LaTeX. Matlab worked fine, too. C++ less so, but manageable.
Then XCode, which worked great for Obj-C and Cocoa. Then MSVC again, as required by my job. Then I added Visual Assist X to make C/C++ programming bearable, then added ViEmu to fight off boredom.
But ViEmu led me down a slippery slope. When I had to leave MSVC for ventures into Ruby, Python, Lua, XML, JSON and Qt I naturally started gravitating towards Vim. And during all those ventures, I continuously improved my cross language vimming skills way beyond anything MSVC had to offer.
When I finally came back to MSVC I found it lacking. My fingers now walked and breathed Vim, and every feature of Vim that ViEmu did not implement was crippling my ability to code. Thus I looked into extending Vim with the IDE features I missed.
This is certainly not the end of the journey, but Vim has proved to be an amazingly powerful tool. It is the first editor I actively look forward to using. Sometimes I get this exhilarating sensation of power when slicing and dicing the code with Vim, fingers flying on the keyboard and Vim moving and changing code as if by magic.
That is bliss. Thank you Textmate for getting me started. Thank you ViEmu for showing me the way. Thank you Vim for liberating me!
Then Textmate. My first big text editor that I invested time in. Textmate proved to be immensely powerful for LaTeX. Matlab worked fine, too. C++ less so, but manageable.
Then XCode, which worked great for Obj-C and Cocoa. Then MSVC again, as required by my job. Then I added Visual Assist X to make C/C++ programming bearable, then added ViEmu to fight off boredom.
But ViEmu led me down a slippery slope. When I had to leave MSVC for ventures into Ruby, Python, Lua, XML, JSON and Qt I naturally started gravitating towards Vim. And during all those ventures, I continuously improved my cross language vimming skills way beyond anything MSVC had to offer.
When I finally came back to MSVC I found it lacking. My fingers now walked and breathed Vim, and every feature of Vim that ViEmu did not implement was crippling my ability to code. Thus I looked into extending Vim with the IDE features I missed.
This is certainly not the end of the journey, but Vim has proved to be an amazingly powerful tool. It is the first editor I actively look forward to using. Sometimes I get this exhilarating sensation of power when slicing and dicing the code with Vim, fingers flying on the keyboard and Vim moving and changing code as if by magic.
That is bliss. Thank you Textmate for getting me started. Thank you ViEmu for showing me the way. Thank you Vim for liberating me!