VIM is a great instrument for programmer. It's fast, stable, has a lot functionality. But there is one thing you should know before you start: VIM is extremely shortcut oriented text-editor.

I was a fan of jEdit, but it is very unstable. A lot of plugins are crashing time after time. So I decided to find something else. IDE's like NetBeans and Eclipse are very slow. I've used Emacs and it was interesting. But it wasn't mine. That's why I've tried VIM.

I'm using it about 6 month and I can say, that my happiness is growing day after day.

Plugins, that you have to try:
rails - awesame plugin for Ruby on Rails
matchit - aotocomplete html tags with "Cntrl"+ "Shift" + "_"
autotag - quick updating ctags file after each file write

that's all :)
VIM has all you need out of box. When I'm saying "all you need", I don't mean "all you want" or "all you expected from VIM". There is a VIM Way. It's quite differ from IDE.

Here is my config ~/.vimrc:

Hi! Today I'm going to tell you about one of great development tools. So, let's start.



jEdit
www.jedit.org

jEdit is a great text editor for programmers.

• It is free and opensource
• It is java-based (crossplatform)
  
• It's fast
• Very flexible

See feature list.

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Plugins
Support of plugins is a key feature of jEdit

A lot of great features are available with plugins. To install plugins jEdit uses "Plugin Manager".

You can install/uninstall/update plugins with it. While installing you can read short description of plugin.

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Project Viewer
Very useful plugin to manage project

One of the greatest plugins is "Project Viewer". With this plugin you can see file tree of your project. In most cases you will need this plugin.

You can have a lot of projects. And it is very useful to group them.

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Docker
Dockes plugin window to jEdit

Commonly it's not very useful to have many windows. So this plugin makes it possible to dock window of plugins. For example, Project Viewer:

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Sidekick
Displays structure of your source file

The SideKick plugin provides a framework for high-level language-specific features.

Currently, this includes a structure tree dockable window, commands for moving the caret and folding based on language tokens, and a basic code-completion framework.

The SideKick plugin does nothing by itself; at least one plugin providing a language parser, such as the XML plugin, must be installed. Currently available parsers for: Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, C/C++, JavaScript, XML, Fortran...

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OpenIt
Quick access to file of project

OpenIt is my favorite plugin. It gives you an oppotunity to instantly open any file of your project by typing first chars of name. It's extrimly fast and very useful.

Has support of special symbols "*" and "?". So you can type "*controller.rb" to get all controllers of your rails project.