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Vim (text editor)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- To find out how to use Vim with Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Text editor support.
| Vim | |
|---|---|
 |
|
 Graphical Vim under GTK2 |
|
| Author | Bram Moolenaar |
| Stable release | 7.1 (2007-05-12) [+/-] |
| Preview release | 7.1.140 (2007-10-14) [+/-] |
| OS | Cross-platform |
| Genre | Text editor |
| License | Free software, charityware |
| Website | http://www.vim.org/ |
Vim is a text editor first released by Bram Moolenaar in 1991. Vim was created as an extended version of the vi editor, with many additional features designed to be helpful in editing program source code; its full name is Vi IMproved.[1]
While Vim is cross-platform, it is most popular on Unix-like operating systems.[2]
Released under a software license compatible with the GNU General Public License, Vim is free software / open source. The program's license includes some charityware clauses.[3]
Contents |
Like vi, Vim's interface is based not on menus or icons but on commands given in a text user interface; its GUI mode, gVim, adds menus and toolbars for commonly used commands but the full functionality is still expressed through its command line mode.
For many users, Vim may present a steep learning curve, meaning that learning is slow initially but once the user gets a grasp of the basics they progress quickly and their editing becomes more efficient.[4] To facilitate this, Vim has a built-in tutorial for beginners. There is also the Vim Users' Manual that details the basic and more advanced Vim features. This manual can be read from within Vim, or found online.[5]
Vim also has a built-in help facility (using the :help command) that allows users to query and navigate through commands and features.
As a descendant of vi, Vim is modal—a design choice which tends to confuse new users. All editors are modal in the general sense of having to distinguish insert and command inputs, but most others implement that modality through very different methods: command menus (mouse or keyboard driven), meta keys (simultaneous use of multiple keys, usually involving control key (CTRL) or alt key (ALT)), and mouse input. Vim, following vi, is unique in that the entire keyboard is switched into and out of these modes. This allows, but does not require, one to perform all editing functions with no use of the mouse or menus and minimal use of meta keys. For touch-typists and those averse to the mouse, this can be a great benefit in power and efficiency.
Part of Vim's power is that it can be extensively customized. The basic interface can be controlled by the many options available, and the user can define personalized key mappings—often called macros—or abbreviations to automate sequences of keystrokes, or even call internal or user defined functions.
There are many plugins available that will extend or add new functionality to Vim. These complex scripts are usually written in Vim's internal scripting language vimscript.[6] Vim also supports scripting using Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, and other languages.
There are projects bundling together complex scripts and customizations and aimed at turning Vim into a tool for a specific task or adding a major flavour to its behaviour. Examples include Cream which makes Vim behave like a click-and-type editor or VimOutliner that provides a comfortable outliner for users of Unix-like systems.
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To meet Wikipedia's quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup because it is in a list format that may be better presented using prose. You can help by converting this section to prose, if appropriate. Editing help is available. (December 2007) |
Some of the main features of Vim and improvements of Vim over vi:[7]
- Vim is almost fully vi compatible (in compatible mode, which is on by default if a .vimrc doesn't exist)
- Portability: there are versions for[8] Amiga (the initial target platform), Atari MiNT, BeOS, MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP, IBM OS/2 and OS/390, MorphOS, OpenVMS, QNX, RISC OS, Unix, Linux, BSD, and Mac OS X. Support for "classic" Mac OS is discontinued in Vim 7
- Command-line editing and extensive completion
- Comparison and merging of files (vimdiff)
- Comprehensive integrated help system with hypertext via ctags
- Configurable status line
- Editing of compressed files (gzip, bzip2, and zip (Vim 7)) and archive files (tar (Vim 7))
- Extended regular expressions
- Extended scripting and expressions
- Graphical User Interface (GUI) mode
- IDE-like build/review/edit features
- Insert-mode completion
- Mouse sensitivity
- Multi-mode folding
- Multiple buffers
- Remote file editing over ssh, FTP, and HTTP
- Scripted plugins
- Session state preservation
- Spell checking
- Split windows—both horizontal and vertical
- Support for Unicode
- Syntax highlighting for hundreds of file types
- Tabbed windows (Vim 7)
- Trans-session history of commands, searches, registers, positions, etc.
- Multi-level undo/redo (version 7 added undo branches feature which remembers all changes)
- Visual mode selection with character/line/block ranges
| Date | Version | Changes and additions |
|---|---|---|
| 1988 | 1.0 | Based on Stevie for the Amiga, named Vi IMitation, never publicly released |
| November 2, 1991 | 1.14[9] | First public release for the Amiga on Fred Fish disk #591 |
| 1992 | 1.22[9] | Port to Unix. Vim now competes with vi. This was when Vim became Vi IMproved |
| August 12, 1994 | 3.0[9] | Support for multiple windows |
| May 29, 1996 | 4.0[9] | Graphical user interface |
| February 19, 1998 | 5.0[9] | Syntax highlighting, basic scripting (user defined functions, commands, etc.) |
| April 6, 1998 | 5.1 | Bug fixes, various improvements |
| April 27, 1998 | 5.2 | Long line support, file browser, dialogs, popup menu, select mode, session files, user defined functions and commands, tcl interface, etc. |
| August 31, 1998 | 5.3 | Bug fixes, etc. |
| July 25, 1999 | 5.4 | Basic file encryption, various improvements |
| September 19, 1999 | 5.5 | Bug fixes, various improvements |
| January 16, 2000 | 5.6 | New syntax files, bug fixes, etc. |
| June 24, 2000 | 5.7 | idem |
| May 31, 2001 | 5.8 | idem |
| September 26, 2001 | 6.0[9] | Folding, plugins, multi-language, etc. |
| March 24, 2002 | 6.1 | Bug fixes |
| June 1, 2003 | 6.2 | GTK2, Arabic language support, :try command, minor features, bug fixes |
| June 7, 2004 | 6.3 | Bug fixes, translation updates, mark improvements |
| October 15, 2005 | 6.4 | Bug fixes, updates to Perl, Python, and Ruby support |
| May 7, 2006 | 7.0 | Spell checking, code completion, document tabs, current line and column highlighting, undo branches, and more |
| May 12, 2007 | 7.1 | Bug fixes, new syntax and runtime files, etc. |
(Note that some dates are approximate,[10] development releases are not listed, and many minor version releases are not yet included in this list.)
- ^ ICCF Holland - helping children in Uganda. ICCF Holland. Retrieved on 2007-10-23.
comments by Bram Moolenaar here, and many other places. - ^ Linux Journal: 2003 Readers' Choice Awards (2003-11-01). Retrieved on 2006-05-24.; Linux Journal: 2004 Readers' Choice Awards (2004-11-01). Retrieved on 2006-05-24.; Linux Journal: 2005 Readers' Choice Awards (2005-09-28). Retrieved on 2006-05-24.
- ^ http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/uganda.html#license
- ^ Oualline, Steve (April 2001). Vi IMproved (VIM). Sams. ISBN 0-7357-1001-5.
- ^ Vim manual at Sourceforge.net
- ^ http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_41.html#vim-script-intro vim-script-intro]
- ^ Vim help system (type "
:help" within vim) - ^ "
:help sys-file-list"
Vim Online: Downloads. Retrieved on 2007-01-07. - ^ a b c d e f Moolenaar, Bram (2002-01-15). Vim, an open-source text editor. Retrieved on 2005-10-24.
- ^ Dates were taken from the official Vim FTP site.
