Vim–The Vi IMproved Text Editor
As happens SO MANY times when I am learning to program, I start off on one topics the the journet quickly swerves into unchartered territory and I find myself in the deep reaches of the Google-verse searching up topics I didn’t even know existed or previously knew little to nothing about.
It was during one such journey that I stumbled across Vim.
Upon first learning about it, I quickly opened it up in my command line to see what it was, and then, just as quickly, I ended up hating it. As seems to be the norm for many a Vim newbie.
But seeing that is was a lightweight program that didn’t seem to use many resources, as opposed to the some of the machine hungry larger text editing programs, I decided to explore it more. This was partly out of necessity, because the aging MacBook Pro I’m using is getting up their in retirement-age years and I have to use programs wisely to extend memory and other resources.
But this was also partly because it seemed to be very esoteric and like an impressive skill to know.
So bridging these two reasons I set out to force myself to learn it at a simply basic level.
Thus my Vim journey began.
According to it’s website:
Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to make creating and changing any kind of text very efficient. It is included as “vi” with most UNIX systems and with Apple OS X.Vim is rock stable and is continuously being developed to become even better. Among its features are:
- persistent, multi-level undo tree
- extensive plugin system
- support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats
- powerful search and replace
- integrates with many tools
After initial hesitation and skepticism, I’ve come to really enjoy using Vim. I like how quickly I can get it up and running. And it pushes me to continually look up information and learn new things about it (a gift and a curse, I suppose).
As I’m learning Vim, there’s obviously a plethora of info available through a google search, but Vim also comes loaded with a tutorial called vimtutor.
There’s also a handy online learning tool here: https://www.openvim.com/.
Biblio:
Vim, accessed October, 23, 2020, https://www.vim.org/.
OpenVim, https://www.openvim.com/.
“Vim (text editor),” Wikipedia, accessed October, 23, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor).
“Where Vim Came From,” Two Bit History, August 5th, 2018, accessed October 23, 2020, https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.html.
