In September 2009, on my first day of consulting for Improving, I met Matt and we ended up talking about our mutual appreciation for ReSharper. At some point in our discussion, he recommended that I check out the Vim editor as well as the Visual Studio emulators for Vim. I played around with Vim on and off for several weeks after that. My head hurt initially while trying to make it part of my workflow but over the next couple of months, I really started liking it. Since then, even though I would consider myself an intermediate Vim user at best, it has become an indispensable part of my workflow and working in a non-vim like application for a long time feels painful now.

Over the years, I have learned about different Vim emulators to lower that pain:

• Viemu: Makes emulators for Vi emulators for Visual Studio, XCode, Word, Outlook and Sql Server.
• VsVim: Open Source Vim emulator for Visual Studio.
• Vimperator: Vim inspired extension for Firefox.
• Vimium: Vim inspired extension for Google Chrome.
• Sublime Text has a vintage mode for Vi editing.
• JetBrains products like IntelliJ Idea, RubyMine and AppCode support Vi plugins.
• Text Editor Anywhere: Not exactly a Vim emulator, but this application allows you to edit text anywhere using your favorite text editor. So I can set it up to compose my gmail messages in vim.

If you are curious about why people use Vim, check out this post. I still continue to be amazed with the new nuggets of wisdom that I’ll pick up about Vim every couple of months. If you know about any more emulators, feel free to mention them in the comments below.