Vim

Vim is fantastic in so many ways, several of which have been touched upon by others.

The features that keep me coming back to vim year after year are:

(1) It is quite possible to perform all editing tasks without a mouse (!). This is a huge plus if you're editing a text document and find that moving your hand away from the keyboard to grab the mouse is annoying and time-wasting. It takes time and practice to learn the keyboard commands, but once learned you'll wonder how you ever worked without them.

(2) The ability to record keystrokes and replay them. I do this multiple times a day and find it far superior to any other gui approach to making the same changes in various locations of a large file. For example, suppose you wanted to change the middle name to a middle initial in a text file with 100,001 lines, each line containing firstname, middlename, lastname. You could easily program the keystrokes to position the cursor at the next middle name, remove all characters except the first, and reposition to the next middle name of the next line. Then simply tell vim to execute that same sequence 100,000 times - and voila in a matter of seconds the job is finished!

(3) The ability to edit column-based blocks. If all lines of the text file were aligned, and you need to modify, say, columns 21-36 of every line in the same manner, you simply highlight the columns and perform the modification. With most gui editors you would manually edit each line seperately.

.. these are just three of my favorite vim features. There are countless others.

BTW I've been using vim every work day since it came out in 1991, and used its predecessor, vi, for the 7 years prior to that! 30 years of vi/vim and still going strong!

[Edited by rmbjr60, August 08]

In 90s - great editor. In early 00s - great editor In 10s - okaaaay, but we have X,Y,Z editors that do everything much faster and easier. in 20s - NO, bullshit.