In the not so distant past I made a decision that I wanted to really force myself to get overly comfortable and proficient with vim. I took the plunge. I had a tough time at first, but as I look back, I’m really glad I did it. I really enjoy vim. I realize there are other great options as well. I’m not against others having their opinions on editors (or even IDE’s for that matter). But for me, I’m glad I made the jump.

I’ve started in on a course that is requiring us to write Java. The natural choice then is to go back to using Eclipse. I’m really comfortable with Eclipse, and recognize the power that it brings. But… I keep believing that I can get it all done just as quickly using the shell and vim. Add in snipmate, Command T and the ability to write some shell scripts, and I think I’ll be happy sticking with vim.

So this afternoon I took some time to build javantas a shell script that handles some of the cruft of starting a small java project.

Give it a spin from the Github Repo.