Bart van Zon Software developer

About

I'm a Dutch software engineer with a focus on backend development using both Ruby and Elixir. With a history in promotional and telecom applications I have an expertise in scaleable applications.

Unavailable for hire

I'm currently unavailable for hire.

Code

My main development languages are Ruby and Elixir, but I have worked with JavaScript, PHP and more.

Tools

Docker, Git, Linux, Photoshop, Vim and many more.

Getting started with Vim

I’ve started using Vim about a year ago, so I’m definitely not an experienced user. But along the way I’ve learned some neat tricks which I would like to share with you.

First there’s installing Vim itself, sure if you’re a Mac user Vim comes preinstalled. But if you want it to play nice with some of the available plugins you’ll need a Vim that’s been compiled with Ruby support. On a Mac there’s a couple ways to do it:
The awesome way: Google like crazy, find the correct files, setup the configuration properly and compile it yourself. I’ve tried this a while ago and got this working in a couple of hours, sadly I broke it several weeks later and never got it working again.
Luckily there’s another way, The lazy way: brew install macvim

Once you’ve got Vim running it’s time for the hard part, actually using it. When you’re coming from an editor like Textmate or Sublime or maybe even a complete IDE Vim will take some getting used to. Luckily Vim has an insanely good help file. When you start Vim just access it by typing :h. EVERYTHING is different in Vim, and made for developer happiness, even something as simply navigation through a file. Sure you can use the arrow keys to move around, but there’s ways way more effective than that, and the help file will slowly guide you through those ways. Just start reading the help file and instead of an enormous list of options it’ll tell you step by step how to get started. After you’ve got the basic hang of (very simple) navigation it’ll suggest you to use vimtutor and I completely agree. Vimtutor is an awesome tool to learn the Vim basics.

Once you’ve installed Vim and worked your way through Vimtutor it’s time to configure Vim to your own taste, I’ll explain where to get started in a blogpost tomorrow.