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Comment by beck5 | Hacker News Reader

This could be very good, I am still trying to find my perfect editor Vim's learning curve & interface means occasionally I just open up sublimeText2/TextMate.

Great to see split views are there from the start.

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I don't want to take anything away from Vico (because so far it is pretty rad), but if you stick with MacVim you eventually start using TextMate less and less until you just stop altogether. For me, it took a good 3 months or so. The last holdout was using TextMate for formatting JSON output, but I found a Chrome plugin for that.

I love MacVim too, and have dropped Textmate completely. The only thing that I don't like about MacVim is that scrolling through text (vertically and especially horizontally) feels choppy compared to Textmate. When I see someone else scrolling through code in Textmate, it looks unbelievably smooth and fluid compared to what I'm used to in MacVim.

That's because scrolling with the mouse was a bit of an afterthough, I think. If you use motions, word objects and Ctrl+f/Ctrl+b you don't really notice this choppiness.

Actually I rarely use the mouse and was mainly referring to Ctrl-f/b and j/k, as well as w on long lines. I don't actively notice the choppiness until I use some other editer, but I wonder why it exists in the first place - is the rendering engine slow or something?

I suspect the reason is the same as on emacs: scrolling always occurs line by line (i.e., there is never a partial line visible at the top or bottom of the screen), whereas on most modern text editors it scrolls by pixel, so it's more of a continuous transition.

I love emacs, but this is one of the sticking points that's really been bothering me of late.

On a side note, it looks like with emacs's set-window-vscroll command, you can actually make it display a fraction of a line. Has anyone had any luck hacking this into a way to do smooth, continuous scrolling?

your right and I have seen my percentage time on vim get higher an higher over the months, but thats from persistance. Its slow progress because I mainly work in eclipse and the vim plugins aren't 100% great for me.

Vim is just hard work getting going, e.g. in HTML I like to have the closing tag automatically done for me which im sure vim can do but i've just not had chance to look into. There are 100 other small things like this which I solve one at a time but often I just go 'cock it' and open it up in another editor. But then I want to split the window and open vim again....

Yeah, I'm sure there's something for it but I took the lazy programmer's road of just using Haml and Sass for everything.

Put this in .vimrc to wrap a block of text with an HTML/XML element (including attributes!): http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/VimTip346

It's beautiful because you can just write (or paste) text, then easily add the markup afterwards.

Try SnipMate(1) for tab-completion and autoComplPop(2) for auto-completion.

(1) http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2540 (2) http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1879

It took me one month and a half to stop using TextMate. Once you are accustomed to oOaAiI, rR, wWeEbB or ci( or all the rest it's very hard to open TextMate and take it seriously.

That has never happened to me - I only use MacVim when I need the power features. I'd love to have vim-style modal editing, but my eyes overrule my hands. MacVim is simply too ugly.

No editor is ugly with Monokai and Inconsolata!

I have this simple json formatting alias defined:

    alias json='python -mjson.tool'

I'm not much of a vi/vim/macvim user, but I bet you could pipe an open json document through that command pretty easily right in the editor.

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