What Vim Can Do

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. It's useful whether you're already using vi or using a different editor. Users of Vim 5 should consider upgrading to Vim 6, which is greatly enhanced since Vim 5.

A General Overview

What Is Vim?

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems.

Vim is often called a "programmer's editor," and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It's not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files.

What Vim Is Not?

Vim isn't an editor designed to hold its users' hands. It is a tool, the use of which must be learned.

Vim isn't a word processor. Although it can display text with various forms of highlighting and formatting, it isn't there to provide WYSIWYG editing of typeset documents. (It is great for editing TeX, though.)

Vim's License

Vim is charityware. Its license is GPL-compatible, so it's distributed freely, but we ask that if you find it useful you make a donation to help children in Uganda through the ICCF. The full license text can be found in the documentation. More information about charityware on Charity-ware.org.

Vim in Six Kilobytes

If all of this information is overwhelming, try a smaller dose. We can expound the wonders of vim in just six kilobytes -- and in more languages than you can shake a stick at!

Testimonials

Don't take our word for it! Read what others have said about Vim.