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Early developers were struggling. They loved the landmark text editor vi but needed something that was available on more than just Unix.
They needed something more tailored to programmers, something that supported syntax highlighting for various languages and remote editing via SSH. They needed to fine-tune their development environments with plugins to maximize their efficiency.
Dutch programmer Bram Moolenaar created his own solution and shared it for free, eventually asking only that users make a donation to a charity caring for children and families in Uganda.
...Proponents of Vim commonly point out the same features as reasons why they use the program:
- Light and portable: Commonly used as a command line interface, Vim can be launched with a terminal, run through a GUI, or used remotely through an SSH connection. Vim is widely used on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
- Highly customizable and full of plugins: As with so many other open-source platforms, users have run amok with creating custom configurations, features, and plugins. ...
- Modality and no mouse functionality: It seems frustrating, but your fingers never need to leave your keyboard. Maximize productivity and coding time by using keystrokes to switch among normal, insert, command line, and visual modes. Keys have different commands based on which mode you’re in.
- Registers: Think of these as multiple clipboards. You can store copied text and macros, which record keystrokes for playback, in different registers. Registers, which persist between uses of Vim, help you save time by executing certain text in a fraction of the time.
- Motions and text-objects: Arguably our team’s favorite facets of Vim, motions and text-objects serve as the verbs and adjectives of the Vim language, allowing you to write your code über-productively. Motions allow you to tack on an action to built-in commands, so you can, say, delete from the current cursor position until the next occurrence of a letter. Meanwhile, text-objects are used in the context of motions, allowing you to declare commands inside or around words, paragraphs, HTML tags, and even current function blocks.
This submission prepared using the Firefox vim plugin, Vimperator.
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Vim Creator Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing the Popular Text Editor, How He Uses It
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want to make some alterations.
-- Kim Hubbard
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday December 26 2016, @10:03PM
If I'm writing code, light and portable is about the last thing on my list of requirements. What I want are features that help me write code and don't get in my way (the "don't get in my way" is where most fat IDEs fail). I don't care too much if my editor needs an extra GB of RAM if it can write 40% more of my code for me (which Emacs does splendidly (not the 1 GB RAM part)).
If I'm editing config files on a remote machine (the "portable" requirement), I don't care what editor I use, because I'm restricted by what's installed on the remote machine. ed, vi, nano, vim, cat, sed, I've used them all. (Of course, there's always Emacs TRAMP mode, which lets you edit files on remote machines locally, even across multiple hops.)
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