Getting back to my vim roots with MacVim

Back when I got my MacBook last fall, I chose to go with TextMate for Ruby and Rails development, despite being a long vim user.

And it was good. I think it was deserving of the hype it usually receives from Ruby developers on Macs. Except for the paying for software thing… I still feel dirty about that.

Recently a friend ditched TextMate cold turkey in favor of vim, after seeing the cool and useful stuff coworkers could do with it. After seeing it myself, let’s just say I’m going back to my roots.

If you’re on a Mac, you just have to use MacVim (not to be confused with this MacVim). It’s basically like gvim, except for Mac OS. Duh.

There are a lot really small, nice integration points and features I’ve been noticing.

• Mac-like text navigation
• option-left/right for navigating words
• apple-left/right for start/end of line
• apple-up/down for start/end of document
• Shortcuts using the apple key
• apple-s for saving
• apple-n for new item
• apple-a for select all. ggVG always felt annoying for doing this
• Recent documents
• Tabbing (apple-t creates a one, apple-w closes it)
• Command line tool, mvim (similar to the mate command). It seems to aaccept the same options you’d expect of vim and gvim.

Similar to gvim using ~/.gvimrc, MacVim uses ~/.macvimrc. Personally, I’ve taken to putting everything in ~/.vimrc, and just creating a symlink.

I’m still working on replicating most of the functionality I came to find useful for Ruby development in TextMate, but I will keep you posted.

I’m also vaguely considering doing some screencasts with vim tips/tricks. One thing I’d want though, is a good way to show what keys are being pressed. I remember back in OS9 days, there was a utility for doing this, but I haven’t found a modern equivilant.