The power of plain text

I am going to echo something from one of my favorite books about programming. In the Pragmatic Programmer a recommendation is made: Pick an advanced text editor and use it! Really learning an advanced text editor pays dividends, not only coding speed but in reduction of hand strain. Personally I use VIM as my text editor of choice but what editor really does not matter.

Try:

• VIM
• Emacs
• Notepad++
• Slickedit
• etc.

But the impotent thing is to pick one and learn it. Really spend some time in the learning it. I cannot count how many key strokes that VIM has saved me with things like:

• :s/[ \t]+$//g
• A,j.j.

The first eats all white space at the end of all of the lines in a file, the second inserted a comma at the end of three lines. In fact the '.' command is my absolute favorite in VIM it means repeat the last edit command again.

Learn how to customize your environment also VIM has it's scripting language (there are versions that can use Lua, Python and other scripting languages too). Emacs has a full blown LISP interpreter that can do anything you want it to. But the most important thing is to stick with it. If your company requires you use this IDE or that editor then learn that one like you would your main editor. your editor is your tool as a hammer to a carpenter or a brush to an artist, treat it with the respect any good professional treats his tools of the trade.