Ask HN: Developing on VPS with Vim and tmux?

1 point·microman··3 comments

I'm a freelance web developer. I primarily develop locally using Sublime Text 3 but I'd love to change this and be able to develop entirely remotely on a VPS. I've tried a couple of times to get into using Vim but I've found it quite difficult.

How many others are developing like this and what tools and resources can you recommend?

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I'm a Ruby developer and 100% of my workflow I spend in the Vagrant with the Ubuntu server and zsh/tmux/vim environment which is virtually the same what you are talking about here. I use my own dotfiles https://github.com/smileart/omg/tree/develop setup (still quite peculiar and raw but can be used as a source of inspiration for your own installation).

I suggest starting with basic operations in the vim without learning all the possible key bindings and plugins and then quite slowly googling or asking someone all your practical questions and emerging issues as they appear (based on the premise that everything is possible and there are always more than one good way of doing things). Like: how to quit, how to delete a line, how to search for something, how to replace/select/move and so on and so forth. It would help you to know just what you need and not to distract yourself with learning excess things.

Then start to explore possibilities and useful plugins for your language and particular case. Good resource for it is: http://vimawesome.com Then you will form your own setup and configuration and since then there is no way back :D

Good luck!

After you're done with vimtutor, check out the book 'Practical Vim' by Drew Neil. Also check out his vimcasts.org site, which has some great screencasts for free.

I'd start with `vimtutor` and http://tmuxcheatsheet.com/

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