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]

It's the most powerful and the fastest text editor that I've ever used.
I write all the text and code on vim, and then I paste it on other programs for the final formatting touches.

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.

I'm a bit terrified to download it. The website promoting it is a UI nightmare and why is there a kid grinning with a VIM Drill? There are 9000 links and when I get to the download page - it mentions WindowsXP? Did I go back in time? I really need a new editor as my fave editor has left the planet. 26 years in this industry and the tried & true keep leaving us.

Very powerful text editor. One of the best in existence. But definitely an acquired taste with a steep learning curve.

Still, well worth the effort to learn so Vim can become your go to editor for any text editing. It is particularly useful to learn it if you ssh into Unix/Linux systems and have to edit text on those systems. Vi/Vim is one editor guaranteed to be on the system.

Swiss army knife and a classic, too!

Vim - Because stuff just has to be as user unfriendly as possible. A lot of programmer elitists are having pride in using vim, well, I hate it. Maybe it makes people feel special knowing a lot of stuff about something, even if it's completely useless, idk. Hence they need a ton of addons or whatever to add functionality any IDE has out of the box and then claim "it's efficient". Yes, spending ages to learn this **** is very efficient. In the same time I could also use something good and actually be productive. Call me lazy, but I don't want to remember a gazillion shortcuts to do stuff that works well in any open source IDE without any shortcuts. And for simple stuff on the console, nano works completely fine.

If you think you have to use vim because you are in ssh and coding on a remote machine, it means that you either:

• could mount the remote directory and use an IDE
• are ridiculous
• are working on a production machine, which is also ridiculous

So there is no reason to code with vim or ed or whatever there is to make your life harder anyways.

I'm symlinking vim and vi to nano.