On 11/09/11 06:39, Kevin Tough wrote:
I am just starting to learn vim. I use Fedora and would like to know whether most programmers use vim from the console or do they/you use gvim. I have read that using one instance of vim is the best usage.
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The best usage is what suits _you_ best: there is no "one behaviour fits all" best usage which should be common to everybody. Vim is all about being able to get the same results by various different sequences of keystrokes and/or mouse actions, and it isn't a rare event to see a question on this list answered by several wildly different procedures which all solve the problem put forth by the OP. In this case too, some people prefer vim, others gvim, others both (and some prefer to use neither but they aren't here). So my counsel would be to try them both at first, and stay with whatever suits you best, which may be very different from what suits me best, or from what suits Ben or John or Dominique or Dr. Chip best, etc.
Like Spiros, I'm on Linux and I use both. I've even installed the CSApprox plugin and set t_Co to 256 in the X terminals which support it in order to have an almost identical look&feel in gvim and in Vim-in-X-console. Of course, Vim-in-Linux-console in pure-text mode on /dev/tty1 to /dev/tty6 has only 8 bg colours, 16 fg, so I cannot use 256 colours there; and also of course, 256 colours don't afford me the same diversity as 16777216, but it's enough for my text-editing needs (photography is a different cup of tea ;-) ), and as long as my colour scheme remains within the 6^3 "safe" colours (defined by the red, green and blue levels being each an integer multiple of 0x33), a 256-colour xterm can display them exactly. On Linux we even enjoy the luxury (unavailable on Windows) that a single executable can run in either GUI mode or console mode depending on how it is invoked, so my gvim and my vim-in-X-console behave in practically identical fashion.
I use one gvim instance as my general workhorse, with several tabs and a huge lot of windows which don't change much (loaded by a session file I wrote myself without the help of the :mksession command), and I use vim-in-console when I'm already in a bash session, e.g. I use "view -" (without the quotes) as my default pager in Mercurial.
Best regards, Tony. -- "Of _course_ it's the murder weapon. Who would frame someone with a fake?" -- You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php
