I have been using Vim on linux for almost a year now, and I’ve grown to appreciate the power of doing so. I code in Python most of the time, so I’ve made some configuration changes to vimrc to make it work well with Python. I sometimes switch back to the terminal to do a few file editing tasks and then back to vim. That’s also basically how I debug in Python.
I recently joined grad school, and I notice that some of our tools require Windows. So my question is this — when I spend several hours on Windows, how do I get back the same type of workflow I have with Vim? It looks like gVim does a lot of good stuff, but I don’t know how to replicate the go-back-to-terminal, test code, come-back-to-code-and-edit workflow?
I have two screens, so the thing I’m doing now is keeping the windows terminal (which is disgustingly limited compared to linux terminal) open in one screen and writing code on the other in gvim. I run code on one screen and write it on the other. Kind of unproductive, but at least it’s close to what I want.
This workflow can exist very well in windows.
Look over MSYS: this will get you most of the Un*x command-line utilities that you expect, and a proper shell in a DOS cmd window. I’ve used the mintty terminal with MSYS, and it’s pretty good: generally better than MSYS bash in a DOS cmd window, although some commands will still have problems in mintty.
vim runs fine in either terminal, or without MSYS/cygwin, in a DOS cmd window, but you should also look at pc vim/gvim. gvim runs as a top-level win application, including File explorer integration: open in VIM.
Install python, and your workflow should be pretty close.