Vim is a great text editor. It is actually one of the most popular ones among developers and nerds especially if they have experience working with Unix-like operation systems. Most people instantly fall in love with Vim’s key bindings and the philosophy behind its mindset. It allows you to do almost anything without using the mouse.

By default, Vim is just a text editor; however, with the help of a few plugins, you can turn it to an IDE. Plugins like YouCompleteMe and Jedi provide auto completion as you type! NerdTree brings tree-like project structure to Vim and Ctrl-P allows you too simply search through your project files and find the file you’re looking for fast.

It also supports themes! You can download and install your desired theme or simply choose from one of the built-ins. You may want to do some strange things in Vim as well. A friend of mine, checks his emails and plays music in Vim!

These are cool right! You live inside the terminal like you’re living in 70’s and there’s no GUI available. You use Vim because it’s lightweight like your 2019 MacBook Pro has only 32MB of RAM and you’re trying your best saving resources. You behave in a way that your computer is something like below! Oh come on man; this is just insane!

Things have changed during the past 3 decades dude! Smartphones now have 16GB of RAM and 1 TB of flash storage. Every CPU now has a powerful GPU built-in which can output up to 8K! The internet connection you’re using to read this post post can download files fast. Developers code in such environments these days:

I love Vim! I really do. I have also published my .vimrc file on Github. But I believe it should be used only if there is no other options. It is the swiss army knife for system administrators because they mostly connect to servers using SSH and need a CLI-based editors get their job done. But as developers, we have much broader options to choose from. That 8GB of memory that is installed on your machine is completely free to use. I don’t want to advertise the text-editor or IDE I’m using myself. It’s completely up to you! You may want to continue using Vim and that’s OK. But just because geeks use Vim for coding doesn’t mean it is the best option and you have to do the same!

If you’re a developer, remember that the job is to develop the software. Your client doesn’t pay you more if you use a geeky text-editor or hard-to-install linux distro. They just want their software to be developed using best-practices and they want it fast. Using CLI-based software doesn’t make you a good developer.