vi, Vim, Visual Studio, and ViEmu
For about the past year, I’ve been using Visual Studio for a lot of my development work. I really like to use vi as a text editor, but IDEs like Visual Studio provide valuable functionality that isn’t present in vim. I tend to switch between vim and the IDE, depending on the sort of editing I’m doing.
Fortunately, a friend recently pointed out ViEmu — it’s a Visual Studio plugin that does an outstanding job of providing Vim functionality without breaking Visual Studio.
After using it for a couple days, I found a few issues that impacted my use patterns, and mentioned them to the author. He was very responsive, and provided an update within days.
For vi/vim users who also use Visual Studio, I highly recommend ViEmu. Now I want a plugin for Firefox/Thunderbird. :)
(I also recommend vim/ViEmu for developers who use laptop keyboards and find themselves frequently slowed down when looking for home/end/pgup/pgdn/insert/delete.)