Using Vim Everywhere

Tags: utilities, vim

One tool I've become very fond of is Vim. From using MacVim as my development suite to incorporating vim key bindings into whichever IDE or editor I happen to be using for my current project. Keeping my hands on the keyboard seems to be a hobby of mine.

What follows is a list of excellent editors and plugins that help you stay in a vim mindset no matter what IDE or editor you're dragged into using.

• jVi for Netbeans and JBuilder

  I find jVi practically indispensable when working with Netbeans projects. It provides all the core movement and search key bindings with some added Netbeans refactoring functions baked in.

• eclim for Eclipse

  Eclim lets you work on your eclipse projects solely in GVim (or MacVim)!

• IdeaVIM for JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA

  This plugin can be installed directly from the IntelliJ plugin repository from within IDEA. IdeaVIM gets you all the standard Vim movement, search and editing key bindings.

• Komodo Edit

  A free editor from Activestate that is cross platform, has a sophisticated autocomplete system out of the box and has some excellent Vi bindings.

  The downside is that the Vi feature set is somewhat limited. For instance, Visual-Block mode doesn't work in the way you would expect.

• VsVim

  A Visual Studio plugin to give you the good down home Vi feeling.

  I don't have personal experience with this one, but it is featured in the Visual Studio Gallery and has some positive feedback.

Here are some useful Vim plugins outside of the IDE/editor scope:

• Vimperator

  A Firefox plugin that makes the browser completed keyboard controllable with Vim-like shortcuts.

• Vimium

  A Chrome plugin in the same vein as Vimperator above.

Hopefully that's enough to keep you steeped in Vim for now.

EDIT ~ I have added some notes on Vimperator per TzBob's request in the comments

By Colin Kennedy

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