There is a religious war being fought over what developers consider to be the best text editor. I won’t try to recruit you into the Vim army here, but I will address one of its main criticisms: it doesn’t do enough out of the box.

Of course, there is a huge community around Vim plugins that provide any and all functionality you could ever want from your text editor, however there is an inherent cost in adopting and managing your own configuration.

There is a pattern of developers maintaining their own dotfiles in Github to manage this, and often you’ll find their .vimrc is the file they’re messing with the most. Tools like vundle and pathogen help significantly, but they can’t solve all the problems.

When I jumped on the Vim bandwagon, I was enamored by all the choices available to me. I imagined a world where my editor and I were so optimized for each other that we were finishing each other’s sentences, covering for each other when we slacked off, and transcending what either of us could achieve on our own. It was beautiful.

I think I made it a week, then it all came unravelled: some plugins were showing their incompabitility with others, I’d spend hours each week tweaking things, and my “always be upgrading” nature would get the best of me. I was feeling the effects of ego depletion.

I began to stray, thinking I should go with Sublime Text at the risk of being labeled a lazy hipster.

Finally I reminded myself of my own philosophy: trust domain experts to do as much of my work and make as many of my decisions as I can. More often than not I’ll be left with a result that’s as good if not better than if I spent the time to weigh all the options and do all the work. This leaves me enough time to work on other problems I’m good at or that haven’t been solved yet.

Janus to the rescue. Lots of people with tons of experience have vetted and continue to vet the best Vim plugins and bundled them all up for everyone’s convenience. It’s easy to keep up to date (just run rake in your ~/.vim folder every so often). And for that rare case where small tweaks are still needed you’re still covered.

Ego repleted. Street cred salvaged.