Full Circle
Preface
What prompted this series of random thoughts was partly a rash of switching from Textmate to VI posts of late and the funniest thing I have ever read . That rant has nothing to do with Textmate to Vi but the context sort of brought the whole thing to a strange focus for me.
In the beginning most of these young innovative web dudes and dude-ettes came up mostly from the M$ Windoze world because that is what they had at home.Upon doing stuff that actually had to work they kinda figured out that Linux/Unix was “good on the server”. Then came like this Ruby stuff, really really cool. Now we all know how painful Ruby is on a Windoze box (actually everything is painful on Windoze but you don’t really know that until you see something like Ruby that doesn’t have a next, next, next, next, next “wizard”). So next comes the move to OS X for these guys/gals. Wow, this works great (shortly there is a realization that this is actually Unix with a way better couple of subsystems al la Apple) and there is this cool thingamagig that you must have called Textmate.
So the word gets around that if you want to do Ruby you gotta have Textmate and that only works on OS X and a Mac. Somewhere the whole Ruby on Unix thing sorta gets subsumed in the Textmate thing.
Fastforward a little bit. Git. Holy crap, this git thing is friggin great. Like Really great. Now you do some cool stuff with Ruby and git hooks and you get github. Wow now we are cookin’. And… hey this git thing is actually better on the command line and come to think of it so is a lot of stuff.
Let’s try this Vi thing (or sometimes this EMACS thing – but I am of the Vi church. What do you expect. I have been a BSD guy since the 80’s).
Man once you get used to it this Vi thing is quite amazing. I was learning all the shortcuts in Textmate anyway but this, this is really living.
2011 – now we have all the Textmate’rs writing about how to make the transition to Vi. I happen to agree that there is a lot to be said for the Mac and Vi, and, and… as the development environment of choice for just about anything but .Not, I mean .Net, or is that dot-net, I don’t know. I just got there from another place. Here I was thinking that I was stuck on Vi because I am an old fuddy-duddy that can’t seem to retrain some 20+ year old muscle memories. I guess everything that is old is new again. Or… Maybe it’s just that some really great ideas are timeless.
RB
:wq