Vim as an IDE
Vim as an IDE is an interactive workshop-style tech talk that I first gave at Carnegie Mellon University as a part of the Computer Club Talk Series. Its central motivation is this: students who have been instructed or told to use Vim to complete programming assignments while ssh’ed are missing out on the vast power that lies within Vim.
There are two fronts to having an amazing Vim experience:
- knowing how to manipulate text using Vim’s built in keyboard shortcuts
- having plugins that make Vim behave like users would expect from a modern text editor.
In my experience as a TA and fellow student, learning the former requires the latter and vice versa, leading to a vicious cycle of Vim peril. With this in mind, this talk aims to cure the latter, so that the vicious cycle can end.
One of my favorite parts of this talk is that it uses commits and the GitHub interface to show participants the diff of exactly what changed alongside a description of how to complete the step.