After using VIm for years as my primary professional text editor for web development and programming, I finally made a donation to ICCF Holland for ole Bram. The next day, I received a very nice email thank you in reply. Even if (and I assume so) it's a computer generated email, the note was appreciated.

The only application I've paid for in my current at-home development suite (and I've paid for it twice! OS 9 and now X) is Transmit, a rock solid ftp client for OS X that does an excellent job syncing edits in VIm to web servers. It's been well worth the $30 I spent, and is a much better solution than Filezilla or whatever that Duck app is that I've tried on OS X several times. (Can't say I care a whit for Coda, though. Perhaps if they integrated VIm in the same way...)

In the past, I've shelled out for Ultra-Edit, Visual SourceSafe, and the VB 6 IDE, though the last two at greatly reduced prices during (legitimate) promotions. I suppose you could include OSes, but that's pushing it. Pretty sure I would have bought those either way. ;^)

Soon, I'll shell out for Versions, an OS X svn client that was nearly as intuitive as Visual SourceSafe, something I can't say for any other svn client I've tried. Version control is a key tool in any developer's bag of tricks, and in the long run the $53 I'll spend there will unfortunately pay for itself a few times -- unfortunate because if you're benefitting from version control it's because you would've lost edits without it. /me guilty

Otherwise, when doing PHP/MySQL work, all I need is MAMP, which is being supported once again and kicks the doors off of XAMMP, at least on OS X. That's free. For Java, I'm still using Eclipse. Free. And for VB.NET the Express version plus sharpDevelop are just enough to get me by. Both free.

So after pulling down as much as I have coding, it was about time to pay up for VIm. If Bram M. wants to send that cash on to Uganda, more power to him. I'm nearly embarrassed to admit I read through much of their literature before donating. I sure didn't ask Panic (the Transmit people) where they were putting their cash before I sent it. I hope the VIm money is headed to Kibaale, but seriously, that's up to Bram. It's a great app, and I'm happy he's helped keep the app up.

Labels: , , , ,