I used to be an Emacs guy and would battle to the death on the war between Vim and Emacs. It wasn’t until a coworker of mine sat down and really showed me just how cool/simple/powerful Vim can be. Just using Vim is a new adventure every day and has really improved my productivity. I now use it to code, blog, and even jot down quick notes.
Last week, I saw on Hacker News a link announcing Vim has been ported to iOS. I have spent a week or so with it and can honestly say the port is almost perfect!
It has most of the major Vim features and commands including:
- Automatic indentation
- Visual mode (block operations)
- Language-aware syntax highlighting
- Integrated scripting language that lets you extend functionalities
- Macros recording and playback
- Markers management (to quickly move around the edited file)
- Multiple clipboards
You even have access to the config file to remap keys and define your own custom macros.
There are a few features that would make this better on mobile however:
- Dropbox Support – Currently you must use iTunes to work with Vim documents on mobile. There needs to be an easier way to share these.
- Keyboard bar – Since you have to switch modes so frequently and there are some keys you type often ( “:” ), it would be nice to have quick access to these.
- Plugin support – This is an Apple limitation
- NERDTree – The file browser that’s built in doesn’t work too well.
With Vim mobile, you can now look even more nerdy on your iPhone 😉
