Sorry Vim, my brain's too small

I have been trying so hard to learn Vim but I have after hours of trying to turn off hard wraps.

I want soft wraps, I can't figure it out after about 3 hours, it's time for me to hang up my programmer pretensions and use a tool that works for me. This absolutely screams user error but as Torvalds says himself about Linux distributions "ease of installation has actually been one of my main issues".

I will go back to Vim, and it's served me well already as I can now use it enough on my own web servers without breaking anything (much). And heck, I've invested too many hours already. I'll start with a blank .vimrc canvas, and make it work for me slowly. For immediate concerns though, like writing blog posts, I'll be using something else.

And there's the rub. I am a proponent of Free Software. Yet my text editor of choice, Notepad++, is only available for Windows. There is Geany, which is a lovely and lean text editor but it is really slow when editing files via SFTP, and this is how I work on remote servers. That leaves GEdit which, surprisingly powerful and customisable though it is, lacks some of the niceties such as selecting HEX colours as one word, like #ff3300.

So my controversial step has been to purchase a license for Sublime Text 2. It is lovely, it just works, it's available for Windows, Linux and OS X, it has a MiniMap and it's... proprietary software. Oh. My. Life. For most people, this is so far from being an issue. But for a proponent of Free Software? Is saying "This is the best tool for me for the job" really good enough? Time for some soul searching... in the meantime, I managed to write this blog with soft wrapped text.