To vi Or Not To vi

I dunno with you guys, but I’m more comfortable coding using a text editor, whether it be shell scripts, or PERL, PHP, HTML, JS, or CSS files. Despite the proliferation of IDEs in every platform, I usually end up writing code in vi or vim. It’s also encouraging to know that a lot of developers also share my preference of coding from scratch using a text editor instead of using IDEs. Read more in this article by Lifehacker, which has featured the Best Text Editors in one of its articles. It’s also interesting to note that vi turned out 2nd in the article’s poll results. The first placer as of press time is Notepad++ which is a Windows-only application. So for cross-platform text editing, vi/vim is still the popular choice. My adventure with vi began when I became a full-time staff at the University Computer Center. I was coding in PERL then (PHP was still in its infancy) and doing some shell scripts. As a Linux sysad, you’ll eventually start writi...