ragged blog

Anyone who gets one of these before me better watch their back….

http://www.fusionio.com/index.html

In my ongoing search for an editor that will make me happy, I recently moved back to Vim.

I have been using the “e-text editor” recently, when working on Windows. The editor went version 1.0 about a month ago, and for the months I have used it, it has been quite the pleasant experience. Mostly for the native feel within the actual text input area. Something which I was previously too lazy to build into a .vimrc. Sadly my trial for “e” ran out, and I don’t feel that it’s fast enough or well integrated enough for my needs yet. The dependency on Cygwin saw me doing a lot of configuration so that I could test various cross platform apps in a sane way, which is a shame.

I also suffered from the load times. I know, I know, this probably means I’m not using the editor correctly, but honestly, an editor shouldn’t take a significant time to load. Gvim 7.1 loads instantly currently, and that’s lovely to come back to. The ability to very quickly and easily issue commands to anywhere, from anywhere, is also very useful - all that’s really required for this is a native command launch at the press of a button, something which too many editors simply don’t have.

Vim and Emacs have been around so damned long that they’re just two of the most mature text editors out there. They’re also written in native C for most platforms. This is something that it’s hard to get away from. Some people say they have “featuritis”, and to a certain extent that may be true. That also equates to actually *having* features though.

I love syntax highlighting. Not because it’s pretty, but because I read code in blocks, and a reasonable colour set can really make reading code faster. Simply put, the syntax highlighting in Vi is just better. I should imagine similar capabilities are present in Emacs also, and that for both these editors, this once again comes from maturity.

Of course, anyone can break the syntax highlighting, as above, but still…

A little work on my dusty old vimfiles, and vim is feeling quite nice to work in again. Shame that some serious configuration is needed in order to really make vim feel intuitive. Of course, my opinion on intuitive controls for the editor actually changes, depending on whether I’m in a gui environment or a terminal - and that too makes life yet more complicated. Vim delivers though.

Is it just me or has the UI speed of Vim increased in recent versions? At least on win32…

I’ll never be able to completely leave Vi of course, being that it’s about the only thing you can regularly rely on finding on a *nix system. Even then that’s not always the case.

[source:ruby]require ‘RMagick.rb’[/source]

Got it?

Hint: Notice the “.rb”

Right.

Okay, some people didn’t get it. This is the fix for getting RMagick to work on win32 when using updated versions of rubygems.

You’d otherwise commonly see:

(no primitives defined):Magick::Draw (NoMethodError)