In my travels, I have seen many masters of their text editors, but none to match the masters of the ancient and complex art of Vim Fu. In contrast to the arts from The Land of The Darkened Sun or the Builders, the art of Vim Fu has great subtlety and variety. If you were to see two different masters of Vim Fu, you might not even realize that they were practicing the same art. And so, in this article, I attempt to chronicle several of the more common types of Vim Master that you may encounter.
The Counting Tigers have a straightforward, powerful style. With a near Rain Man like ability to count at a glance, practitioners of this style will frequently use commands like 5dd or 2y{. To Counting Tigers, the world may be broken up into units and numbers.
The masters who follow the Path Of One Thousand Stars (though they use an equal number of question marks, pluses, dots, and other meta characters) eschew the straight-forward approach of the Counting Tigers, instead opting for the elegance of patterns. Their forte will be commands like yt,. And :%s/old/new/gc is deeply ingrained into their muscle memory.
The Masters of the Hidden Mark rely on mx and 'x extensively, whereas the Counting Tigers would remember the line number and type 166G. The Visionaries rely extensively on visual mode, highlighting relevant sections and applying their commands to all the region. Members of this clan frequently rely on column mode editing, an art that other masters often see as being of little value.
The Way of the Macro Monkey leads practitioners to define mini programs of character sequences, constantly creating ephemeral, custom scripts to achieve their goals. The Pure take this craft to another level, constantly redefining the basic art of Vim Fu to the point that it is not recognizable by other Vim Fu practitioners. Their .vim/plugin/ directories may have thousands of .vim files. They can also be readily identified by their fierce, nearly fanatical refusal to use any other tool.
In great contrast to The Pure, there are a number of Wandering Masters. While Vim is their first weapon of choice, they will use Eclipse, NetBeans, or any other tool that makes their task easier. They eschew the more esoteric features of Vim Fu, instead seeking to synthesize features of other arts with the core basics of the Vi Path.
Here I feel I must make a special mention of the masters of the Viper Clan. Though not proper Vim Fu masters, they seek to join the great art with techniques gleaned from the masters from the strange, twisted lands of Emacs. Some consider their art an abomination. Others hope that they will bring civility to Emacs. Yet others prophesy of a chosen one that will at last bring true peace and unity to the House of Vim and the House of Emacs.
Lastly are those of "No Style". Borrowing from the philosophies of Bruce Lee, these rare few strive to master all aspects of Vim Fu, and yet limiting themselves to no one approach. These masters can do things with their Vim Fu that seem magical even to other Vim Fu masters. While it is not meant for all of us to truly master the art of Vim Fu to this degree, by aspiring to perfection, and constantly extending our mastery of our craft, we can become better practitioners of the Noble Art.
