Vim - Vi IMproved Vim web pages Vim download Vim the book Vim book errata

Vim is a professional text editor. It can be used to edit plain ASCII in a highly productive way. Although it is aimed at programmers, it can be used for many purposes.

Vim behaves like the standard Unix editor Vi, and adds many useful extensions. It is included in all major Linux distributions. Vim runs on many different operating systems, including MS-Windows, OS/2, many kinds of Unix, Amiga, VMS and Macintosh.

Most commands are normal key strokes, works very efficient.

Multi-level undo.

Syntax highlighting for over 170 languages.

Translates files to HTML with syntax highlighting.

Consistent over many different operating systems.

Advanced script language.

99.9% backwards compatible with Vi.

Visual area selection, any operation can be used on the selection.

Recording of commands.

Many more.

Bram Moolenaar is the main author of Vim. Many other people help improving Vim by sending patches, doing ports and giving comments.

If you like Vim, consider sponsoring Vim.

There are several books available for Vim. You can find more information about them here.

Errata for the "The Vim book by Steve Oualline" book are here.

Is Vim any good? Well, it has been voted "the best editor" and got several awards.

Readers of Linux Journal voted Vim to be their favorite Text Editor, in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005! You can find the results in the November issues and on-line for 2005,

Vim has been selected as finalist in the editors category of the LinuxWorld Editors' Choice Awards for 1999.

Picture of the crystal award and the associated sign.

The award was collected at the LinuxWorld conference by Wichert Akkerman, who makes the Debian version of Vim. A few weeks later we met in Utrecht with a bunch of Debian guys, where Wichert handed out the award for Vim and a few others for Debian. Here is a picture of the meeting, with the awards (Paul Slootman took the picture, therefore he's not on it).

At the Linuxworld expo in New York, February 2000, Vim was nominated for the slashdot Beanie Award in the category "Open source text editors". Other contestants were Emacs, Xemacs, Joe and Pico. Vim won! Info on the Beanie Awards There is a video of the awards party . It's a bit big, but it's fun to watch! The $2000 price has been donated to ICCF Holland, to help the orphans in Uganda. Info on ICCF Holland.

On April 6, 2018, in Krakow, Poland, I have done a presentation called

Vim: Recent developments

This presentation is about the work done between Vim 8.0 and 8.1, mainly the Terminal window and terminal debugger. Also about the impactful changes done for each release.

The presentation can be viewed in PDF form

On February 13, 2007, in Mountain View, CA, USA, I have done a presentation called

Seven habits of effective text editing 2.0

You can download the presentation in PDF with notes (640 Kbyte). The DOI is: 10.13140/2.1.2204.9929

You can watch the video on Youtube. The presentation is about 45 minutes, with the Q&A it is about 80 minutes.

If you can't get this video to work, you can also download the DIVX file. Warning: this is 507 Mbyte!.

The article was re-published in Hacker Monthly Issue #33, February 2013. The table of contents is on the website.

Translations: French, Russian by Coupofy, another one in Russian, Kazakh language and Indonesian

Articles about Vim.

Releasing version 8.0 and getting close to the 25th birthday inspired the writing of this article. It contains links to relevant info and can be used to convince a friend to start using Vim.

An interview with Bram Moolenaar in the Dutch weekly magazine Computable. This is in Dutch only. It was published 2002 March 15.

I wrote this article for the very first issue of the Free Software Magazine in China. You can now read it on-line. It's about the design of Vim, the future of open-source and charityware.

I have been interviewed by Juraj Bednar. This will be published in the Slovak computer magazine PCRevue. You can find the text here.

There is an interview with effervescence about Vim, with Sven Guckes and me. You can find it here.

Short paper on charityware.

This was handed out at the Linuxworld expo, February 2000 in New York.

On February 9 2002, I have given a presentation on Vim 6.0 for the NLLGG (Netherlands Linux users group). The slides are available here (540 Kbyte, only in Staroffice format!)

On October 10 2000, at the linux2000.nl conference in Ede, Holland, I have done a presentation called

the continuing story of Vim

History Development choices Features for programmers Charityware New in version 6.0 Current status

On November 9 2000, at the NLUUG autumn conference in Ede, Holland, I have done a presentation called

Seven habits of effective text editing

You can download:

the paper in plain text (14 Kbyte).

the paper in MS-Word (43 Kbyte).

the paper in compressed PostScript (47 Kbyte).

the paper in PDF (24 Kbyte). Aaron Müller made a German translation.

the presentation in Powerpoint (156 Kbyte).

the presentation in compressed PostScript (228 Kbyte).

the presentation in PDF (205 Kbyte).

