Vim has been my editor of choice for a while now. For web development it is perfect -- lightweight, tightly integrated with the command line and highly customisable -- not to mention present by default on almost every linux servers. Despite having a steep learning curve (mostly due to its modal nature), once you learn its vocabulary it feels highly inefficient to ever do without it.

Which brings me to the problem. I love efficiency (my .vimrc file is by far the most frequently updated config file I keep in my .dotfiles repository and it's mostly due to trying out new plugins to make me more productive) and I often like to try out new and shiny feature-packed editors. However, most editors which would potentially make me more productive just don't cut it: they either have no vim mode or it is very poor to say the least.

Enter Atom editor. Atom hit its stable 1.0 release back in June and has two vim plugins: vim-mode (which provides the vim vocabulary) and ex-mode (which provides the ex editor style :colon commands). Neither are perfect, but they're a whole lot better than any other new and shiny editor I've tried.

The biggest things I miss from vim is the persistent undo (which gives you the amazing undo tree feature -- SO handy). Also sed style replacement isn't perfect (I can't seem to do :%s/deleteThis//g with an empty replacement string). But for the trade-off of new and shiny features, it's by far the best vim-mode editor I've tried so far.

Let's see how long it lasts... I'll try hard, I promise.