bling on software

First, let’s start with a Javascript function:

function foo(hello, world,
             how, are,
             you) {
}

Now let’s convert that to the following:

function foo(parameters) {
    var hello = parameters.hello;
    var world = parameters.world;
    var how = parameters.how;
    var are = parameters.are;
    var you = parameters.you;
}

Here are the macros I used to do this:

let @r='di(iparameters^[/\{^M2o^[kpg`[v`]Jgv:s/\s//g^M0:try|exe "norm! @q"|endtry^MA;^[V:s/,/;\r/g^Mv``='
let @q='ywivar ^[pa = parameters.^[f,^[l@q'

It wasn’t too long ago when I was a full-time C# developer and my environment was Visual Studio eight hours a day. Then, I became a web developer over night cold turkey writing Javascript and CSS. It’s one of the benefits of working for a consulting company.

You might think what does that have to do with the title of this post? Well, originally my plan was to write a blog post contrasting on the differences between Javascript and C#, as well as the development environments and deployment platforms. But really, what I really wanted to write about was Vim.

Moving from Visual Studio to Vim was a progression through different editors and environments. The first thing I used to write Javascript was Webstorm. Over time I realized that you didn’t really need an IDE to write Javascript/CSS. Then, I used Sublime Text for a little bit. But ultimately, I settled on Vim, and stayed there.

My stubbornness turned out to be beneficial when I was learning Vim because the first month was absolutely painful. I remapped all of my arrows keys to do nothing to force myself to use hjkl. Eventually I got the hang of it, and now I definitely have the muscle memory that makes me much more productive when editing (and reading) text.