I'm just curious if anyone here still uses vi(or vim) as their source editor. Currently its my editor due to it being light weight and I'm used to it since its installed in every unix/linux console I've ever touched. Only thign that bugs me about it is that, even with some interesting plugins, its pretty limited for a big project. I still haven't gone beyond section 3 in the C++ primer, but I know that once I start on my first few games that the lack of of tools for easing the pains of a big project are going to annoy me.

I do use it at home and at work. I actually adopted Vim only recently, because I got frustrated to the fact that my previous favorite editor (KDE's Kate) was not as widely available as Vim. Kate and kioslaves actually was a very nice combination, as I could open files from practically any machine I wanted over ssh, samba, ftp or whatever but the problem struck when I was on a non-KDE or non-unix machine or I did not have access to X Windows.

If I can manage 10000+ lines of code projects with Vim, you should be able to do that too. It's not that much about what editor you are using but what build system, documentation system, version control software, etc you use. Some of these features are built-in in some IDEs, which is why some people prefer IDEs over editor and command line. I prefer having a good and simple editor without that many bells and whistles and a set of command line tools to keep my projects in order.

Stick with Vim if you like it. You might want to check out other editors/IDEs, but if they feel cumbersome and/or there is no productivity increase, you can always go back to Vim.
-Riku

I am using vi from time to time for a bit of scripting or for quick-and-dirty hacks. If I had the time to drill myself in using vi, I'd definitely use it more frequently. I'm a avoid-teh-mouse-wherever-possible-dude :)

But for coding in general, I also love those lightweight scintilla based editors/IDE's (Anjuta, SciTE, and at work notepad++ (win)).

semper vi!

I hate having to use the mouse. When I'm gaming, sure, np, great input device. When I'm trying to do work...it drives me up the wall whenever I need to tkae my hand off the keys. It disrupts my flow..which is why I love vi/m so much. Really I just wanted to see if I was crazy wanting to stick to vim when working on something that would take very many lines of code like a game.

I use Vim at home for my own projects and use ViEmu that JohnBSmall linked above while at work. Once accustomed to how things worked (movement by hjkl took me a while to get used to) I feel so much more efficient than using a regular text editor.

There are plenty of plugins available to help manage larger projects. Ctags should come with any Vim installation and one plugin I found handy was Project which basically adds a project explorer in a split pane.

I probably would use vim more if I ever took the time to get to know it enough. I use Eclipse+CDT as my IDE right now, and I have a project with 100+ files. I've never found a good way to use vim with many files at the same time. I often have several files open at the same time, and I like Eclipse tabs, and the fact that Eclipse remembers which files I was working on last time.

However, I recently started playing with python a bit, and found that vim was very good when writing python code. I've learnt some basics with vim now, and I can definitely see how good an editor it can be if you only take the time to learn it properly.

I'm hooked on Vim, I started using it a long time ago (7+ years I think) and now I keep typing Vim commands in to any other editor by accident. Which is one of the reason why I prefer to create my documents using LaTeX.

This tip helped me out quite a bit:

http://www.vim.org/tips/tip.php?tip_id=1439

I use vim together with other powerful unix tools (egrep, sed, awk, etc.), and I think these tools works great in large projects.

christer.