For the past year or so I’ve been “switching” to Vim. I’ve used Coda, TextMate, Notepad++, Sublime Text, TextEdit, Espresso, Pages, WriteRoom, Kod, Xcode, and Vim over the past twelve months. Addmitedly, I probably never experienced everything these other editors had to offer. At this point, I don’t think I ever will. Vim is now my only editor.

I haven’t gotten here alone. I’m not the only person to switch to Vim, and many others have explored the subject in much more detail than I will. I simply want to collect the various resources I found while learning Vim. Hopefully they’ll be of help to others.

• Switching from Textmate to Vim

  Daniel Fischer’s guide to switching was perfect as a guy coming from TextMate. His view, along with Janus’ Vim Repo made the switch simple and friendly. It’s easy to out grow this though, as it’s hard to understand everything that’s going on with such a drastic change. I also found that I never used a large portion of the features enabled by Janus.

• Anything @tpope

  Pathogen has changed the way I’ve been able to use Vim for the better. It made the switch away from Janus much easier as I began to customize Vim to my specific needs.

• Vim: Revisited

  Mislav takes the opposite approach to weaning onto Vim. He starts with a barebones .vimrc where he understands every line and builds up from there.

  This is exactly the opposite of what I did, but I found quite a few things he mentioned to be useful. This method could also appeal to some thinking about getting started with Vim.

• How I Boosted My Vim

  Some great power user tips that helped add a few things to my .vimrc. I love the shortcuts to editing the .vimrc file and also disabled the swap. Like him, I save every time I pause for more than a second.

• Coming Home to Vim

  There’s a decent bit of repetition here from other resources, but I like his perspective on it. It’s nice to have a background about the author so you can decide how much you’re going to agree with what he’s doing in his Vim world.

• Vim Color Scheme Test

  A great tool for looking at tons of color schemes when you’re picking yours out. Way better than :color <Tab> a few hundred times.

That’s all I really have for now, but I’ll keep revisiting this and adding as I find more general Vim resources.