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Comment by jarin | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people I know switched from TextMate to vim because of the lengthy delay. After using vim for a couple of years now, it would be very hard to go back to TextMate.

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From what I've gleaned, it sounds like (although I haven't been able to try the alpha myself) that TextMate is missing some crucial features, such as split screen functionality. After switching from TextMate to vim I'm almost certain I won't be able to switch back and especially not if stuff like that doesn't make it into the final release.

Split screen functionality would be SUCH a welcome addition.

Modal editing is the killer feature for me -- and the lack of those special project files cluttering up everything. Even if TextMate had splitscreen, Vim used with the project-oriented NerdTree and BufExplorer plugins is a tough combination to beat for everyday hacking.

Sublime Text 2 with Vintage mode enabled comes close, but man does it clutter up your project folders.

How does it "clutter up" your project folders?

With ONE project file, that you don't even have to put inside the project folder?

This fork of Macvim has a very Textmate-like file browser baked in.

https://github.com/alloy/macvim/downloads

https://skitch.com/ericschiller/gtbb9/index.html.haml-dev-sa...

After using Vim for the last 3 or so months, I really can't see myself using anything else. You get to a stage of fluidity where no other editor can compare.

I was an avid TextMate user up until 2 years ago when a situation arose where I was developing on a remote box. I tried sshfs and TextMate for a while but the latency made the situation unworkable so I turned to using Vim. I've been using it exclusively ever since.

I've been trying to use the alpha all day and I've found that I've forgotten all the useful shortcuts that I previously used. Also navigating using the arrow keys is much less efficient and it feels clumsy.

While I'm happy to see TM2 released, if even in alpha I think many like myself are too accustomed to the Vim way of life to ever return.

Yeah, but far more people will never learn vim because of the learning curve.

The vim learning curve is greatly exaggerated: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/13164810557/the-vim-learni...

I suspect that people who actually try Vim are perfectly likely to learn and like it. People who are scared away by comments like yours, on the other hand...

It took me several false starts over the course of a few years to finally take the plunge.

Vi is incredibly easy to learn, but it takes some learning before you can accomplish anything. You can sit down with Bill Joy's original paper, read it, try stuff out, and you will be using Vi at 50% of the competence of a master with years of practice.

Emacs on the other hand seems to be simpler to get started in, but it never gets simple like Vi does. After you get over the first hump, you just see the Himalayas rising behind it.

I use Emacs right now, but I'm interested in moving to something that plays nicer with Mac OS and the god-awful lack of respect for Unix standards in the Rails community (like failure to exclude ~ files from the asset pipeline).

If backup files are giving you an issue, you can change the behavior of emacs so that it saves backup files in a separate directory, instead of the alongside the file that is being edited.

(setq backup-directory-alist `(("." . "~/saves"))) (setq tramp-backup-directory-alist backup-directory-alist) (setq backup-by-copying t)

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