Vim – King of My Terminal

It’s been a few weeks now since I lasted used gedit as my code editor. I used to only use it, but now I’ve become a converted Vim user.

I was pretty efficient with my setup – my src folder open in the background, gedit to one side and a terminal on the other. However, I have recently had quite a long holiday, so I decided to properly try switch to Vim. I had previously used Vim in small doses when I had to edit a file over an ssh connection, but the time for me to finally jump in the deep end had arrived.

I closed gedit and opened up a nice ol’ terminal where I promptly ran Vim. After some time spent Googling and reading Vim’s excellenct built-in help, I had a nice little vimrc setup. After a few more refinements, before I arrived at my current setup. It looks like this:

Some of the “features” of my setup:

• session plugin – Save and load all my open tabs with F5 and F6.
• molokai theme – Who knew 256 colors could look so good?
• powerline plugin – Works as well as it looks.
• alternate plugin – Quickly switch between my code and header files.
• tagbar plugin – Jump around the current file with ease.
• yankring plugin – Cause everyone uses copy/paste.

If you would like to see exactly how I got it to look like this, have a look at my vimrc. Undoubtedly I will continue to make changes to it, but for the moment, I am rather proud of it.

I got the inspiration to write this post after reading this, so go read that too.