I used Textmate for almost 3 years before deciding to switch to vim.  I watched one of my coworkers use it and was impressed by the fact that his hands never had to leave the keyboard and navigating around files was much faster with vim.

I started out using macvim and the janus vim distrubution.  It is packed with all kinds of goodies for Ruby/Rails development.  The first 2 weeks were painful and I had to force myself to stick with it.  I was definitely less productive during those 2 weeks, but after I got past the learning curve my productivity started increasing and now I am much more productive than I was with Textmate.  I am far from mastering it and I think those productivity gains will continue to increase as I learn more and get more comfortable with the keyboard shortcuts.

2 weeks ago, I tried to upgrade Janus and it caused my environment to become unstable.. crashes, performance problems, etc..  I decided to trash my whole vim environment and start over.  In the process I found another vim distribution – YADR.  I had to use it after reading the documentation.  IMO it is better than Janus, but it is also very opinionated.. so definitely not for everyone.

I will be keeping a log of customizations, workarounds, etc in this blog post mainly for my own reference.

Problems:

1. SCSS syntax checker fails to recognize SCSS imports from a Rails Engine

I am using thoughtbot’s bourbon SCSS mixins.  The mixins are part of an engine that outputs to the asset pipeline, so the vim plugin syntastic was not able to recognize the includes.  For some reason it would kill the syntax highlighting and throw the cursor to the start of the file every time I saved w/ Command+s.  I don’t really need the syntax checking for SCSS, since the asset pipeline will automatically show me errors.  To disable it, I just deleted the the syntax checker (I guess you could rename it also if you wanted to keep it around):