MacVim vs Backblaze

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.

The default configuration includes everything except for system files to be backed up. That also includes external USB drives. This will work for most people. It can, of course, be customized to each person's liking.

There are no limitations of file size or amount of data you can upload. The $5/mo plan gets you unlimited cloud storage.

Backblaze creates a zip file of all your files for you to download, thus decreasing the amount of data you need to download and increasing the speed of the download since it's one connection instead of multiple that need to be opened and closed for a list of files.

AES encrypted files are transferred over a secure SSL connection.

Some backup services like Carbonite require a client to be installed to restore files. Backblaze allows you to login and download any or all files from a web browser, meaning it also serves as an ad-hoc cloud storage platform.

You can have a flash drive or an external hard drive delivered to you. They cost $99 and $189 respectively.