vi with Agile Staffordshire

vi, and its more recent clone vim, is a tool that has a 30 year legacy and is still gaining new users. In our January Git session; upon committing code at the terminal, vi launched and confounded many of us. It was decided, by the group, to arrange a session on vim. It transpired that Agile Staffordshire already has a number of vim users of varying competency.

Introduction

To begin, I (http://twitter.com/trevorjadams) will introduce vim and some of the basic features and ‘modes’ for simple editing. This is designed as a ‘noob-to-noob’ session. I have only been using vim for about 6 months and will be figuratively ‘a page ahead’ of the learner. I will explain some of the differences between standard GUI editors and some of advantages of the vim ‘way of things’.

Further vim

Jason Underhill (https://twitter.com/underhillj) will continue the session with some additional features; these include:

• Spell check

• Code formatting

• Regular expressions

• searchBuffers, windows and tabs

Plug-ins will also be introduced, demonstrating vim’s extensible architecture, some of which; Ctrl-P, Surround, SuperTab, Endwise and Markdown.

Alternative IDE

Consider notch turned up! Paul Williams (https://twitter.com/Paulswilliamsuk) will demonstrate why more developers are moving from full-blown IDEs to ‘legacy’ editors, such as vim. He will demonstrate a full terminal workflow using vim and tmux, automatic unit test execution and using a Clojure REPL. Imagine Repl + Test Driven Development without an IDE!

Tooling Up

This will be a practical session, so bring your laptops. Most operating systems have vim available; either installed or via a package manager. The notable exception is Microsoft(R) Windows(R). Visit vim download page (http://www.vim.org/download.php). Wi-Fi Internet access has been provided by Staffordshire University in prior events and I expect they will be kind and do it again.