Sunday, November 7, 2010

Learn me a Vim and Git for great good!

I have been postponing these for a few months - getting better at Vim and getting started with Git. I have downloaded the vim casts by Derek Wyatt some time back. Get Started with Git from A List Apart was what I chose for Git.

I have used vim now and then since college, but never got serious enough until now. I have seen people who scrolled mouse indefinitely (or pushed the down arrow for an hour) to reach the ten thousandth line and hated them for that reason alone. Now that I have started some coding, I have found myself doing a lot of jkhl in vim. So, felt it was time I started climbing the dreaded learning curve. I had good time with IDLE for Python, but I had to move to one of the real editors. I never really liked IDEs. So, an oath of allegiance to Vim. (I am still using Dr.Racket for scheme though.)

This is probably the first time I have ever used Version Control. I was very impressed with Git and started using it right away. The tutorial I mentioned earlier was very good. I had some doubts regarding merging of branches etc., need to learn more. My wait for the day I can proudly push a repository to github should not be very long.

Installed GoldenDict in place of my old favourite Stardict. The interface is much better and the integration of Wikipedia and other web dictionaries including UrbanDictionary was excellent. My search for good en-en dictionaries ended up in some Russian websites and I had to use a website translator for the first time.

My respect for Linus Torvalds grew even more after using Git. Creating two of the most popular software used by developers is no ordinary feat. These books - Learn you a Haskell for Great Good and Learn you some Erlang for Greater Good have been on hacker-news over the last two days. Hence, the post title.

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