In the image above I am immersed into integrating Compass into Pinax (full post on that will follow).

When developing under Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 at the moment) I have settled for a long time now on the ultra-productive tiling window manager Xmonad. Nothing I tried beats it. My fingers and my brain now are one with the keyboard short-cuts and the concept of mouse-less zen.

Yes I use vim extensively and yes I use screen with the new ubuntu screen-profiles. It rocks.

I saw the trend very clearly, spanning from reddit to news.yc and let me say that the material that came up recently is very good; those neat posts prompted me to improve my vimrc dramatically and I really like what I learned.

In this installment, instead than annotating my vimrc (another one? not that interesting, I’ll refrain) , I want to compile a roundup of the best vim articles I saw recently.

I’ll also add a few classics that changed me from a hater to a vim lover and will conclude with some minor tips out of my bag.

So here we go with the roundup.

Recent Vim Articles Roundup

Jamis Buck

Vim Follow Up

Coming Home To Vim

Jamis Buck switches back to vim from a period using TextMate and talks about his experience and his configuration. Many useful tips in there.

Stephen Bach

Configuring Vim Right

Sensible defaults for your vimrc, recommended.

Learnr dev blog

Configuring Vim Some More

Some additional configuration options that totally make sense and I incorporated in my config too.

Swaroop C H

A byte of vim

A new free e-book on vim, worth reading. Covers also advanced topics like writing your own plug-ins.

Effective Vim

This ends the recent vim trend spotting. But there are some older links that are worth sharing in my opinion.

Older Vim Gems

Jonathan McPherson

Efficient Editing With Vim

This is a true gem, an intermediate level tutorial that will convert you from a beginner vim user to a way more proficient one.

Jerry Wang

vi for smarties

Very good beginners guide to vim.

David Rayner

best of vim tips

Raw tips from a very long time vi/vim user

Vim is also great for Python development, 3 ideas…

vim omnicomplete awesomeness

How to make vim a modular Python IDE

How to replicate SLIME in vim

Finally a few tips from myself

vimperator: If you’re a heavy vim user you might want to checkout the great Firefox extension vimperator. You’ll find yourself browsing mouse-less with familiar vim keystrokes in a matter of minutes. I love it.

viPlugin for Eclipse: If you’re a Java developer (been there, done that) and you’re stuck with Eclipse, you definitely want to have viPlugin. It makes the Eclipse experience something much more pleasurable for one who has vi keystrokes embedded in the fingers.

cool color scheme: If you’ve seen “some” screen-casts and you have just a subterranean TextMate envy and you can’t stop thinking at that cool color-scheme, well think no more, you can use this one or my humbly tweaked version.

For delicious users here is the page of my bookmarks that made me notice the trend.

Ending note

For full disclosure I have to say that I have been – and still am sometimes – an Emacs user. One of the rebel ones daring enough to use Viper mode. So now you know.