EmacsĮmacs and Vim are not exactly competitors in the realm of obscure text editors. This begs the question, why would you want to choose any other obscure modal text editor? Now it’s time to take a look at Emacs. Likewise, if you log into a different server in a different location, managed by a different host, you will still have Vim at your fingertips, ready to accept your commands. For example, if you “shell” into your InMotion Hosting VPS server, you’ve got Vim available. This means if you learn Vim on one computer, you can take that knowledge with you everywhere you go. Many complex commands are built into a few basic keystrokes, which means you can move around your document and edit text at much higher speeds.īecause it is small, portable, and very popular, Vim is included on virtually every operating system you may ever use. This may sound like a tedious and laborious process, and it is, but once you get used to it, Vim can rapidly improve your text editing workflow. And once you’re done inserting text, switch out into “command” mode to start performing commands upon the text you’ve inserted.
In order to type words you need to switch into “insert” mode. You can’t simply start typing words into Vim the way you can in Microsoft Word or any popular word processing software. This is where a Vim novice will quickly get tripped up. Vim is also a modal editor, meaning it has different “modes” you can switch in and out of.
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Screen editors allowed the user to view a whole document (or, parts of it, if it’s a long document) full screen. For some applications, this was good enough, but more complex documents demanded more visible editing space. In the old days, line editors could only let you edit one line of a file at a time. Vim is a screen editor, as opposed to a line editor.
Free, because you don’t even need to download it, it’s already installed in your operating system.
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The vi editor, pronounced “vee-eye,” better known by its later iteration, Vim, is one of the world’s most popular free text editors.
But which one to choose? They both have their pros and cons. They’re too old, too difficult, yet somehow intriguing. If you’re in the market for a fast and dangerous text editor with all the bells and whistles you’ve probably looked at Vim and Emacs and, maybe, shook your head and gave up.