The CS Club at Stevens hosted its second Vim Day last Thursday in the Pierce building. The event was a four-hour session to introduce beginners to the Vim text editing software and how to harness its full potential. The event was lead by CS Club member Chris Kelly. “Vim is a code editor for terminal [in Linux]. It’s like a text editor but it has syntax highlighting,” said Kelly. If editing text in the terminal sounds like a nightmare, or you’re on Windows, don’t worry. “You can get a Vim plugin for Sublime Text,” said Kelly. There are also other third party versions of Vim for Windows. The advantages to using Vim over, say, Notepad++ or Eclipse, while not obvious at first, make sense for efficiency-inclined coders. “[Vim allows for] faster editing, and all commands are single letter keystrokes. You don’t move off the keyboard, your hands never touch a mouse,” said Kelly.
Last Thursday’s Vim Day covered the first week’s topics for the first two hours, and then moved onto more advanced topics in the latter half. “[We hope this event will give people] the ability to use Vim as a replacement for non-command line editors. And emacs. Don’t use emacs,” Kelly said. Sophomore Patrick Grasso, the Vice President of the CS Club, echoed his sentiment. “A lot of what we’ve been doing in CS Club is geared toward the underclassmen. [Teaching freshmen about] a lot of tools that are really important, and Vim is one of them,” he said. There are other important tools that Grasso uses too. “If I’m working in a big codebase in Java, I’ll probably use Eclipse,” he added. Kelly didn’t quite see it the same way, calling Grasso’s use of other code editors “sacrilege.”
“Vim or nothing,” Kelly said.
“I’d like people to come away [from Vim Day] with an interest in attending our future events,” said sophomore Jason Gardella, President of the CS Club. “Next Fall we’re going to have a lot more lessons. We want to attract the incoming freshman and get them to learn about computer science.” He detailed some of the CS Club’s past lessons. “[We did] Git, which is a version control system. Also, basic command line commands… We’re planning on doing a big hackathon in the Fall with IEEE.”
“I want to get more of the upperclassmen and start some [coding] projects, said Grasso. “Like Chris, for example, who’s doing this lesson,” added Gardella. “The whole point of the club is to provide a great environment for people to improve their knowledge of computer science. Not just Computer Science majors, but everybody. A good part of that is getting people who are experienced in computer science to come help out. Some meetings we just kind of hang out and talk about computer science news and industry events. Just by being in a room with people and talking about computer science, you can learn a lot.”
The CS Club is small right now. The members at the event encourage more people to come to meetings, such as Computer Science underclassmen who don’t know much about the field yet. “Or people who aren’t in Computer Science who want to learn more about it,” Gardella added. “Or anyone who does know about computer science and has something to offer,” said Kelly.
“We’re all inclusive,” said Gardella.
CS Club member Bradford Smith found Vim Day informative. “It was very helpful. I was using Vim a little bit prior to Vim Day, probably a little less than a year. The way it was explained at the last Vim Day made a lot more sense than looking it up online. Hearing it from another person was better than reading [about] it.” He had a word of advice for those thinking about joining the club. “Go for it. If you’re even a little bit interested, come and try it out.”
The CS Club meets in EAS 230 on Thursdays at 9 p.m. Any students interested can email Gardella at jgardell@stevens.edu for more information.
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