Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

Chapter 9. Vim (vi Improved): An Introduction

This part of the book describes Vim, the other vi. We briefly introduce Vim and the most noteworthy of its many technical advances over vi, along with a bit of history. We’ll finish this chapter with some pointers to special Vim modes and teaching tools for new users. The following chapters cover:

• Editing enhancements over vi

• Multiwindow editing

• Vim scripts

• The Vim graphical user interface (GUI)

• Programming enhancements

• Editing patterns

• Other cool stuff

Vim stands for “vi improved.” It was written and is maintained by Bram Moolenaar. Today, Vim is perhaps the most widely used vi clone, and there exists a separate Internet domain (vim.org) dedicated to it. The current version is 7.1.

Unconstrained by standards or committees, Vim continues to grow in functionality. An entire community has grown up around it. Collectively, they decide what new features to add and what existing features to modify, by nominating and voting for suggestions during development cycles.

Inspired by Bram’s dedicated energy and the voting system, Vim enjoys a strong following. It maintains its value by growing and changing with the computing industry and, correspondingly, with editing needs. For instance, its context-specific language editing started with C and has grown to encompass C++, Java, and now C#.

Vim includes many new features that facilitate the editing of code in many new languages. In fact, many features promised at the release of this book’s previous edition ...