[cjc]

Disclaimer: I work 7 feet away from agotterer.

I convinced him to try VIM a few months ago. He tried it for a week but didn't find it productive so switched back to zend. I blame myself for not fully explaining the productivity benefits of a properly configured VIM environment, so I'll try again:

Learning VIM requires a huge time commitment (weeks, even months before it is truly second nature). However, after 'getting it', there is less of a barrier between your brain and you code. I have code completion, good syntax highlighting, syntax verification, and keyboard shortcuts to do anything and everything to my text. My IDE is pre-installed on every sever I've ever seen.

I am highly recommending using VIM as an all purpose text editor, and specifically as a PHP IDE. Knowing it is a skill that be used whether you are an author, developer, sysadmin, or any occupation that requires typing.

[raamdev]

I use both VIM and Eclipse PDT on a regular basis. Recently, while looking for a nice free Eclipse plugin that gives me vi key bindings (I haven't found one yet), I came across an interesting project: Eclim (http://eclim.sourceforge.net/)

While most Eclipse plugins bring vi functionality to Eclipse, Eclim goes the other way and brings Eclipse IDE functionality to VIM (using an Eclipse plugin that acts as a server-interface to a collection of VIM plugins). I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds interesting.

VIM is definitely top dog. I remember how excited I was when I learned how to use ":vsplit" and ":e ." -- I spent the next few years using it as my IDE. (Off topic, but equally as exciting was my recent discovery that the screen utility can do split-windows! Yes, I need to RTFM more often!)

[nikblack]

+1 for vim, which I didn't mention.

I don't run X on *nix so when I am doing dev there I use vim, and have done so for a long long time