I’ve been a fan of Vim since the mid 90′s, it all started out of pure frustration with PERL and CGI Scripts. I knew HTML – but who didn’t? It was the easiest thing to learn, but ugh PERL and CGI Scripting was just a nightmare. I gained my first client, and had it not been for pre-scripted CGI’s by other developers and some patience, I would never have made it through to today. CGI Scripting was a whole different language, one that required a lot of patience and logical thinking – but the downloads, text edits on notepad, upload, change permissions, log reviews, notepad to make changes, FTP again – recycle, rinse, repeat. It drove me insane and much worse, it took forever to debug anything.

After moving to Hawaii back in 2000, I was just learning the basics of Linux Server Management and had very little knowledge of Vim or it’s existence. But I could certainly find my way “somewhat” around a Linux Box – go me! I landed a web developers job at a travel company – Travel Hawaii , my job was to assist the owner and lead programmer with web graphics and design – mostly HTML and basic CGI installations. I started working alongside Chris Bopp, the lead programmer, Bopp (as I call him) is perhaps one of the most sane creatures there are in this world. Here’s a guy who exerts the geek persona to the nth degree. The man could solve any programming issue that was directed to him, you name it – he had the answer – or would find it within minutes.

Chris taught me everything I didn’t know about Linux, I still occasionally run back to Chris for assistance, mostly because, he’s just that smart! During this time, Dreamweaver had entered the market, Danny Sullivan had begun his first or second SEO conference back in the old days when Search Engine Watch was king. I remember the day John, the owner at Travel Hawaii handed me a big white binder he had gotten from one of Danny’s conferences – It was my bible I was told. Every secret there was to landing #1 listings on search engines was found in that binder – ah the good old days. I utilized Dreamweaver for everything – basic HTML the WYSIWYG interface was phenomenal. But again the delays of FTP, change permissions, errors in code with no real way to determine what line in the code was producing the actual errors. It reported line 26 but if you utilized SSI or PHP includes, there just wasn’t a way to really find the errors, so frustration continued.

Then Bopp introduced me to Vim and even today I wonder, how the hell did I get through the past without it. For those of you who still utilize basic notepad and other fancy doohickies to mark up your code – I pity you!! Vim is the answer to every coders dream. What used to take me 4 hours, now takes me 30 minutes. The simple find and replace commands, easy access to the shell itself, full utilization of primary keyboard keys and the best darn WYSIWYG “your browser” makes it unbeatable for developers. With my little experience using “less” and “more” and with the power of “grep” and “fgrep” learning Vim was easy.

PHP Code became easier to manage, with the ability to quickly find beginning and ending brackets of code ( { and } ). CGI Scripts were similarly easier to debug, a simple refresh of the browser would help me determine where the errors were in the code. Whether I needed to delve further into the server such as permissions or was I missing a simple quotation mark. Regardless of the problem it took mere seconds to fix and I was well on my way to my next project.

The best thing about Vim is the formatting, I’m able to format code and HTML with simple commands and eventually these commands came as easy to me as typing “ASDF JKL;”. CSS Stylesheets are easier to compose and HTML became less of a hindrance with my Vim skills – anything code, even the new AJAX and JavaScript libraries are easy to debug through Vim. Scriptkiddies – can stick to dreamweaver and frontpage, I’m going to keep my old school Vim and produce more work in less time. That way I can do what I enjoy doing most, shop to my hearts content.

To give you an idea of how fast I work with Vim and SSH – last week I redid a entire website of 100,000+ webpages with new CSS and some additional code. I had the entire site completely upgraded and redone with fresh CSS stylesheets, new Google Sitemaps, new code to render MySQL queries faster and all under 4 work hours.

My design team sends me a brand new PSD file, and I am able to write up the CSS, HTML and supporting PHP scripts, as well as JavaScript all within minutes. Now, Dreamweaver can do this as well – but you will still have to clean out that code to make it search friendly. My way, is simple and easy and the changes are made directly to the server and web host environment with no hiccups to stop the progress. I can minimize mark up to work with different browsers on the fly and never miss a beat. I don’t work on test directories, everything is done and pushed live within seconds. Can you say the same with your current style of code? I never trust software that promises to make Search Friendly Websites, I do however trust the simplicity of basic text editing through Vim. Happy Coding!