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Comment by yankcrime | Hacker News Reader

What did going from MacVim to vim buy you, exactly?

Terminal integration. Which is invaluable as it's a big waste of time cross referencing your projects acroess different parallel contexes.

What's MacVim give you? I never got the point. Everything I've seen also existed in the terminal with a few simple vimrc config. Mouse/trackpad, clipboard integration, OSX commands.

The experimental renderer in MacVim creates a much more fluid editing experience than Vim, I find. Other than that, I think the only thing I use from time to time that is MacVim-specific is command-S, which aliases nicely to :w or to a file browser where you can enter a file name if the file is unnamed.

MacVim (and GVim on Linux) have better color scheme support. Solarize is great.

MacVim also works with PeepOpen, which was just a jaw-dropping upgrade from tab-completing all my file paths from the project root. It practically reads my mind.

I'm thinking I will give FuzzyFinder a try soonish, though, since it would also work on Linux.

About MacVim vs vim and 'color scheme support' and 'solarize': Actually the issue is with Terminal.app which has some weird setup where changing the background is either impossible or always looks horrible.

Also it's particularly difficult to get Solarized setup in a terminal using 256 colors rather than manually resetting the 16 colors of your terminal to custom values.

If you have a sane terminal, vim works fine with 256 color support. A lot of people on OSX use iTerm 2 which I hear has fine 256 color support. I just use gnome-terminal on Linux that's had support forever and dropped solarized since the maintainer is not interested in making any setup work besides gVim/MacVim it seems.

Happy MacVim user here, but for me replacing TextMate with MacVim led me to replace e-texteditor with gVim when I'm on Windows. I have a shared vimrc I use on ubuntu server too, so it's really all vim. Maybe that's what minikomi meant.

As an aside, I wish someone would write a Windows version of vim as good as MacVim. (Yes, I also wish I was talented enough to do it myself.)

Mainly just got used to running it in iterm2 with split windows .. Saves a context change when using a REPL heavily

One thing: you don't get used to things that won't work on a tty, e.g. when connecting to another machine over ssh.

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