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As a die hard Unix junkie, I’ve been using ex/vi/vim for the greater part of the last 15 years. One thing I’ve never tried doing is customizing my environment. Before my experiment, I’ve never had vimrc, or used gvim or anything like that. Over the years, I’ve hacked more c, c++, perl, and share scripts than I care to admit with no editor customization what-so-ever.

Now, that I’ve been introduced to the real power of vim, I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere anytime soon. These days I mostly hack in ruby and javascript, with the odd mixture of erlang, c, and other esoteric languages that pique my interest at any given whim. So, what makes me want to stay? I came for the split windows, and I’m staying for everything else.

So, what is everything else?

FuzzyFinder

I was first introduced to FuzzyFinder by Jamis Buck a few months back, and knew that there was something special about it. It captures one of my favorite features of Textmate pretty nicely in fairly complete and use easy to use package.

NerdTree

One of the most daunting things for a beginner vim’r is seeing of the context of what you are working on and seeing how it fits into your larger project. NerdTree gives me a simple file tree in a new window. I can easily browse my project. Aesthetically, it doesn’t match the Textmate drawer, but functionally it’s even better because it is easier to work without the mouse.

VimRails

I’ve know about the Rails plugin for Vim for quite a while. Tim Pope, the plugins creator has even answered a random question or two for me over the past couple of years. I don’t use this all the parts of this plugin, but I do enjoy the parts I use. I’m all about the easy navigation in my Ruby on Rails projects.

Gist and Pastie

Everyone needs quick and easy access to shareable paste bins. Access to Pastie is even built into Textmate.

Slime

This is my new favorite thing. Being able to have “slime” like integration for a bash shell, irb, or mysql is like heaven for me. Jonathan Palardy should be commended the execution of his slime plugin.

I think for now, I’m putting my editor experiment on hold. I’m really enjoying where I am right now. And that I have found IR_black for Vim, I don’t think I’ll be leaving any time soon.