I made a big step in coding geekdom this summer by upgrading the most low-level part of my programming workflow. It started when I got frustrated with Mac keyboard shortcuts on Scandinavian keyboard layout (they Just Don’t Work for most apps), and switched to US layout in coding. Once I made that transition, I started thinking that maybe I could improve my coding speed a bit more, and see what all the fuzz is about Vim.
The greatness of Vim in coding comes from the fact that Vim has separate modes for editing text, and navigating around. While not editing, all normal keys become powerful commands, and you can do text manipulation like duplicating lines, indenting sections etc. without ever leaving this “normal mode”.
Well, Vim is great, but an additional bonus to its power is the fact that almost every *nix system has it preinstalled. So even if I’m not on my own computer, I can just launch an SSH client and use Vim to edit the piece of code I’m working on. No need to compromise. Except color schemes, which I just couldn’t get working over Putty. Today I solved that puzzle after one and half hours of googling, and thought to share the findings, maybe someone will find this the next time they face the problem.
Continue reading Vim Colorschemes with Putty aka. GUI vs. xterm-color256