MacVim vs Better Window Manager

Every plugin available for Vim is available for MacVim too.

MacVim is Vim, meaning it has all of Vim's customizability and power.

MacVim supports OSX's native shortcuts making the adoption of Vim easier.

MacVim, like Vim itself has a large community backing it.

In cases of a selected font missing certain characters, MacVim will find a font that has that character.

Vimtutor is an excellent interactive tutorial for people with no prior experience of Vim. It's bundled with Vim and takes about 30 minutes to complete.

Vim associates keys with words. For example, d is for "delete" and w is for "word". To perform an action you string together letters. Thus, to delete a word, press dw.

This way it's possible to abstract a large amount of functionality that Vim provides in an intuitive way.

Interaction with Vim is centered around several modes. Each mode has a different purpose and switching between them changes behaviour and keybindings. There are 12 modes in total (six basic modes and six variations on basic modes) and four of them are used commonly.

Insert mode is for entering text. This mode most resembles traditional text entry in most editors.

Normal mode (the default) is entered by hitting ESC and converts all keybindings to center around movement within the file, search, pane selection, etc.

Command mode is entered by hitting ":" in Normal mode and allows you to execute Vim commands and scripts similar in fashion to a shell.

Visual mode is for selecting lines, blocks, and characters of code.

Modes allow separating concerns between various tasks and reusing keys for different kinds of functionality. As a result, the workflow becomes more efficient.

Permits writing characters that don't fit in one byte, most notably logograms (for writing in languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean) and Unicode characters.

FinderMinder allows you to specify where (position) and what size you want newly opened Finder windows to appear. The default Finder behavior is to remember the last position and size for every window, but this can be frustrating if you already know where you want every window to appear (for example, centered at 800x600). FinderMinder must be running for window reposition and resize to take place.

FinderMinder must continue running in the background for window reposition and resize to take place, so click the "Hide" button to dismiss the preferences and keep FinderMinder running. Simply re-launch FinderMinder to access the preferences again or to quit the app.

The app costs just $3 and offers a free trial for testing it out before buying.

I've tried almost every app on this list. I thought it was amazing how many there were out there by the time I finally stopped experimenting and searching for the one I liked most. I chose Optimal Layout mostly because it was sufficiently extendable and felt lighter to use than the others. There were lighter ones, but those were very limited in their features and customizability.

The price is right! It comes from a great source of developers who already have window manager apps on this page's list. I am not sure what they plan to do with this app in the future, whether to keep it light and by itself and work in conjunction with their other window managers, or add this feature solely to one of their other fully featured window manager apps.