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September 29, 2005

From Vim to Eclipse

I used to do almost all my coding (and editing in general) in vim. I actually think vim is one of the most brilliant pieces of software ever created -- obviously not because it's particularly feature rich, but because it is simple and elegant. I can use vim for editing almost any type of document, on any platform, and it can be used remotely through ssh just as easily as it can be used locally.

But I've actually been using Eclipse more and more lately in an attempt to modernize. I find the editor itself slower to use (not because of performance, but because vim was designed from the start to make navigation and editing as fast as possible), but in general, all of the features of Eclipse have actually made me more productive. In an attempt to get the best of both worlds, however, I'm now experimenting with a Vi plugin for Eclipse. It seems to work pretty well, though not exactly as I would expect in all circumstances, so I'm debating whether to stick with it, or just give up and surrender myself entirely to Eclipse. Whenever possible, I always try to stick with as much of the default functionality of an application as possible so that I can move from one machine to another and feel like I'm in the same environment. Ironically, that's precisely one of the things I like best about vim, and might be what prevents me from trying to integrate it into Eclipse.

Posted by cantrell at September 29, 2005 09:35 AM | References

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Comments

Christian is there a CFML plugin or something for vi that you used?

Posted by: Pete Freitag at September 29, 2005 11:14 AM

I used the plugin in conjunction with CFEclipse. They work fine together.

Posted by: Christian Cantrell at September 29, 2005 01:44 PM

Don't you hate it, when using someone else's computer, you type :wq and nothing happens and you realise that you're in homesite or something. D'oh!

Posted by: HKS at September 29, 2005 03:24 PM

Yeah, whenever I use an editor other than vim, I usually end up typing "jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj" at some point.

Posted by: Christian Cantrell at September 29, 2005 04:38 PM

OK yeah the only problem with Zorn is that it's not Vim. ;) I'll give the Vi plugin a shot.

Posted by: Manish Jethani at September 29, 2005 05:21 PM

Nobody seems to have mentioned that it's €15.
Given that both Eclipse and vi are open-source, it is rather dissappointing.
Even so, I might have considered buying it, but certainly not with the aggressiveness of having an error every startup and an alert every thirty seconds! :@

Posted by: Peter Boughton at September 30, 2005 01:41 AM

I know what you mean about vin, BUT textpad is the tool for me

Posted by: mark at September 30, 2005 01:55 AM

I had a 'vi' port running on my Psion 5MX handheld and loved it!

I still use vi / vim for quick'n'dirty edits, especially of files that aren't part of an Eclipse project, but I always have Eclipse open so most of my editing really is done via Eclipse... I don't find it that ardous to switch between the two.

Posted by: Sean Corfield at September 30, 2005 08:36 PM

I too am trying to switch from vim to eclipse. Are there any other vim plugins available?

What are the default key bindings like for eclipse? is it emacs-like?

Ivim

Posted by: Ivim at October 6, 2005 07:13 AM

Well ladies and gentlemen... It's finally happened. Some group of geniuses decided to do a full on integration of VIM and Eclipse. It requires java >= 1.4, Eclipse 3.x, and VIM 7 (which is still in alpha). It seems like a very young project, but they are working on it. I didn’t get a chance to install and try it out, but I’m sure, given enough time, it will be wonderful. Check it out here

Posted by: Java Developer at December 22, 2005 12:29 PM

I was unable to click the link above so I did a bit of googling.. and I am excited since this has been a recent issue for me, visit here for more info:
http://eclim.sourceforge.net/

Posted by: Clayton Smith at December 24, 2005 08:16 PM

This is exactly i wanted too .In my company everyone is using VIM but i wanted them to use ECLIPSE as well for development .But editing is difficult .so some plugin like this will definitely help

Posted by: Ashish at January 18, 2006 12:26 AM