alex.moskalyuk

Bram Moolenaar, the creator of vim, spoke at Google yesterday as part of their open source developer speaker series. He mainly spoke about developer efficiency, and not as much about vim itself, except for the Q&A session, when people asked lots of questions about vim ongoing development and future.

Moolenaar, now a Googler, spoke in great detail about improving efficiency when working with large amounts of text on aregular basis, which is 90% of a software developer job. His mantra consists of:

1. finding inefficiency
2. finding a way to correct that inefficiency and optimize it
3. making that optimization a habit

Suppose you find yourself doing the same menial task such as copy and pasting or retrieving links from an HTML document. The proper way of thinking about this is “How can I optimize this to a single or double keystroke?” The solutions from Moolenaar (which, surprisingly, mostly involved vim) included sets of macros, regular expressions and just new commands that would make the routine task automated.

One drawback of such dependence, of course, is inablity to work in any other environment, except for the editor you’re married to and the one you created macros for. If you want to edit your Microsoft Outlook e-mails using your vim editor, because you find it most efficient, most likely it will not work.