What Vim Can Do

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power ofthe de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set.It's useful whether you'realready using vi orusing a different editor. Users of Vim 5 and 6 shouldconsider upgrading to Vim 7. The main advantages of Vim 6 compared to Vim 5 can be found onthis page.

A General Overview

What Is Vim?

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient textediting. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed withmost UNIX systems.

Vim is often called a "programmer's editor," and so useful forprogramming that many consider it an entireIDE. It's not just for programmers,though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composingemail to editing configuration files.

Despite what the above comic suggests, Vim can be configured to work in a verysimple (Notepad-like) way, called evim or Easy Vim.

What Vim Is Not?

Vim isn't an editor designed to hold its users' hands. It is a tool,the use of which must be learned.

Vim isn't a word processor. Although it can display text with variousforms of highlighting and formatting, it isn't there to provide WYSIWYGediting of typeset documents. (It is great for editing TeX, though.)

Vim's License

Vim is charityware. Its license is GPL-compatible, so it'sdistributed freely, but we ask that if you find it useful you make adonation to help children in Uganda through theICCF. The full license text can befound in thedocumentation.Much more information about charityware onCharityware.info.

Vim in Six Kilobytes

If all of this information is overwhelming, try a smaller dose. We canexpound the wonders ofvim in just six kilobytes --and in more languages than you can shake a stick at!

Testimonials

Don't take our word for it! Read whatothers have saidabout Vim.

Vim sponsors

The people at HostingAdvice.com like Vim so much they have writtenan article about it.

Other websites likeDotcom Monitor andWeb Hosting Buddy have written articles about Vim and its use in development. You can read ithere andhere.

Vim is also championed by a variety of tech companies who use it in developing web applications includingLoad View Testing.