Try using the Vim plugin (Vintage or the newer one, Vintageous) with Sublime. That way, you can gradually get used to modal editing.

I worked like that for 8-10 months then made the switch to Vim. I've gotten so used to modal editing (not to mention window management etc.) by then, that I didn't even skip a beat.

This was my strategy when I switched from TextMate to Sublime a few years ago, the plan being to make the full switch to vim in a few months.

Sublime never gave me a reason to go all the way, though :p

I was like that while using ST2. But then better plugins started appearing for ST3 (the aforementioned Vintageous being one of them) so I switched to ST3.

But it crashed constantly; also, by that time the Vim emulation was really hurting me. The dot command was anemic, tabs were interfering with splits etc.

All in all, Vim was calling me, haha.

I've never though about that! But it sounds great! A question though... I don't know how much though you actually have put into this, but I'm curious. What do you consider a cheap computer?

I do all my coding (though it mainly web, which arguably might need less resources than other languages) in a medium tier pc. It's a lenovo B590 with an i3, 8GB RAM. It's not exceedingly fast but with two windows of chrome, 20 tabs each, 5 or 6 instances of PHPStorm open, and all the usual programs (email clients, dropbox, chats, etc) it still feels quite snappy.

The cost here in Austria was around 650€ or so in total, maybe less (I'm not quite sure now because I upgraded it little by little).

My question is if your plans are set around a dirt cheap machine that you "wouldn't care at all" if it gets stolen, lost or broken... Or something more in the lower middle class where you'd have to be careful not to lose one per month, but you could still run most of the stuff you'd actually need for local development.

This question arises mainly for my concern is greater about not having a working reasonable internet connectivity hence making it difficult to work over ssh, rather than the laptop getting stolen or broken.

> two windows of chrome, 20 tabs each, 5 or 6 instances of PHPStorm open

Jesus Christ, that sounds excessive.

Vim can be run well off of a $35 Raspberry Pie if that means anything to you. That machine has 512 MB of RAM. Basically every laptop will be able to handle it just fine.

Theoretically yes, practically it will be slow, but it's no the CPU/RAM it's the SD card (poor I/O speed) that slows down VIM on embedded devices. You have to disable swapping, you could load your current working dir to RAM and them write a script to save the data elsewhere but that's dangerous for production.

So the best device to run vim IMHO it's still a top-notch SSD-based laptop. A chromebook (intel-based to avoid other sort of issues) would be a better bet.

Yep, works just fine on my $200 Acer chromebook.

Don't dream it - be it.

I work this way most of the time now, regardless of which machine I am currently using: http://blog.schwuk.com/2014/01/15/chromebook-plus-digitaloce...

Here's a really interesting post about that: http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-...

https://github.com/fatih/subvim - unfortunately "Linux version is on the todo list, I'll work on it asap"

I do that currently, but using the local graphical editor. I just mount the ssh path to my local FS using Expandrive. It's not free but I can recommend it.

To be fair, an editor built on open web technologies could also be at the core of a dream to travel the world with a Chromebook.