Merhaba,

So this is the story of how it started and how it is going on. So lets start with the story part.

I currently do develop web apps as my daily job. Before that I worked on LibreOffice as a GSoC participant. This was the most job-like thing I did before working as FE developer at Linovi.

Among my colleagues and friends who work as developers, it is common to use popular IDE’s. I believe it is a worldwide thing since most of us start programming on IDE’s at school. Most of the front-end guys I know use IntelliJ/Webstorm or Sublime. I did also use IntelliJ/Webstorm about a year. It is a fine IDE to use in most cases for most people. It is open source and free to use (without half of its functionality). It has its own pros and cons of course. It has too many features with Ultimate editon but it costs a lot and it is not open source.

I did use vim before, during the GSoC because at that time LibreOffice code was too big (actually still too big) so no IDE’s can handle the indexing. So my best option was using a text editor. I could use either vim or emacs at that time. One of my friends used vim during his internship, so I have chosen my new text editor with his suggestion.

As a sophomore Computer Engineering student I was in a desperate need for autocompletion to code. So that was when I discovered plugins. With the help of ctags you could handle the autocompletion which IDE’s failed to. Also you can highlight syntax etc with vim so it has the potential to become an IDE with the help of the plugins.

So this was the story of how I started to use vim as IDE. Now I do not have to use vim and I can use some other IDE. But I do find IDE’s too bulky to do editing. They also have their plugins to handle stuff therefore it makes them bulkier. You may have performance problems with vim also with plugins but it is way more lighter than IDE’s in general.

What are my other options then; Sublime? is not open source, Atom looks promising for now I will stick with vim. MS Visual Studio Code is also open source however it is from Microsoft. I DO NOT want to use anything from Microsoft until I believe they changed. This is a subject that I argue a lot with one of my friends. There is an obvious change on Microsoft but until I am fully convinced, I will probably stay away unless I have a desperate need to use.

My config

Rule of thumb - Search what you need to do with vim! There is a plugin for that!

My vim config lives in here. I change my config time to time. It is based on Fatih Arslan’s vimrc. Go check his dotfiles there are many more stuff you may like.

My config is self explainatory in general just read the comment lines. Feel free to use it, change it, and share your thoughts on here.

Until next time. Cheers,