Vim is an advanced text editor, which harvests the power of Unix' editor 'Vi', albeit with an enhanced feature set. It is highly configurable, and has been designed to enable efficient text editing, much like 'Vi'.
Key features include:
- Vim offers syntax highlighting for over 200 languages.
- Edit-Compile-Fix.
- Highlighting Matches.
- Highly configurable.
Vim is not just for programmers though; it can be configured to work in a very simple manner called Easy Vim or eVim. Vim is not a word processor, but it can display text with various forms of highlighting and formatting. Vim is aperfect tool for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files.
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With Vim you can edit very effectively. The most often used commands are just a single key stroke. To allow for this, you need to start Insert mode to enter text and return to Normal mode to execute commands. This is advantageous in that you can keep your hands on the keyboard and work very fast. The learning curve isn't that steep and if you are used to other 'in-depth' editors then Vim maybe what you are looking for. However, if you really don't have time to learn the effective way of editing, there is the Easy Vim option.
