I could just update my existing post from a couple of days ago but I have another point to make afterward.

Firstly, there is a minor release of ViEmu available as of yesterday. What I found most notable was near the end where Jon says he will be working on the ReSharper issue mentioned in my last post as well as an updated keyboard configuration dialogue. Both will be welcome additions and I’ll be grabbing that release hot off the presses.

Here’s where I think I missed the boat a little. I thought I’d blogged on ViEmu before so I didn’t dwell so much on my opinion of the software. Last June-ish, I decided to give the various vi/vim tools a try because they’d been getting some press. I gave a good college try to ViEmu for VS, SQL Server, and Word. I also had Vimperator for browsing. I tried all of them for at least a month and after that time, I still wasn’t as productive as I was without them.

Recently, as I mentioned, I’ve had a more vested interest in reducing my dependency on the crack we all call “mouse”. So Vimperator and ViEmu came back into the fold. I was pretty surprised at how much I had remembered from last time. This helped a lot because it meant the learning curve was that much lower. Whereas the last time, I had to get used to the navigation before I could learn the more involved intricacies of the products, this time, I had the navigation and search features buried in the back of my head somewhere.

Where I’m going with all this is I think ViEmu for Visual Studio is a good buy for developers, a point that didn’t come across in my last post. I don’t know that I do enough in Word and SQL Server to justify those but that’s me. Maybe you’re in SQL land more often. But I spend enough time in Visual Studio that it makes sense to investigate ways to improve the experience. I mean, how long does a carpenter hammer in nails before he gets a nail gun?

There’s a heck of a learning curve as with all things vi. (This kind of goes against my philosophy of “If something is hard to learn, it’s not worth learning” but I’ve made an exception in this case. See also: NHibernate). There are still minor hiccups, not least of which is my tendency to press j and k in Live Writer. And I was expecting this huge rush of superiority to descend upon me when I started to “get” it but I guess I’m still not quite at the “holier-than-thou” stage of the process. Looking forward to that because I do so respect those people that are so dismissive of others for not liking the same tools they do.

In any case, you’ll also find the author is very receptive to questions and suggestions on both the site and, more recently, on Twitter. And speaking of Twitter, you’ll find no group more helpful than ViEmu and ReSharper users. Give it a try by asking “What’s your favorite tip for <insert either one>?”. (Since you asked, it’s one I just discovered: Unbind Esc from Edit.SelectionCancel. Many thanks to Aaron Jensen and Joey Beninghove for that one.)

This public service announcement inspired by the author’s knowledge of how &*%$ HARD it is to build decent add-ins for Visual Studio.

Kyle the