Anyone with the remotest affiliation with Unix or its many varieties has undoubtably witnessed at least one flamewar over text editors. Yes, many of us take our editing habits quite personally and defend our tastes emotionally from time to time, finding inventive ways to prove that our editor of choice somehow makes our collections of characters better than another.
The following two pages are a lighthearted attempt to play both sides. Interestingly, the second one generates as much email traffic to my mailbox as the entire rest of the project combined. (Please review our more balanced page on the background of text editing perspectives before taking these to heart.) We will continue to maintain these pages as long as no one's feelings get hurt, so please--relax!
- Vim utilizes computer technology and human interface concepts from the 60's with text commands to accomplish everything, so that you don't need to worry if it will work with your new-fangled mouse or monitor.
- Vim is free! (More precisly, it holds to the principle of being Free.)
- Vim is very powerful.
- Vim works on a very large number of platforms, including Windows, GNU/Linux, Apple, Unix, Amiga, Be and many, many others.
- Vim has so many features you'll never even know what they all are.
- Vim is extremely light weight. Although some superflous GUI design features have been intentionally omitted, this means Vim starts up almost instantly and you can run it remotely on another computer, even over a very slow modem.
- Vim scripts are blazingly fast. They are in fact so fast that one can write scripts to do just about anything with little regard to speed overhead.
- Vim is well supported and extended.
- The Vim community has some extremely helpful people (such as can be found on Vim Online Support page) who take time to solve your problems on their own time.
- Vim is amazingly customizable, which means that it can do pretty much anything you want if you take the time to program it. (Just look at Cream--long time Vim users barely recognize it!)
- Vim is very popular. (Except with Emacs people. ;)
- Vim is as timeless as a computer application can be, given Vi's 1976 origins with Unix. It should be around for a long time to come and not become obsolete at your next upgrade, or even OS.
- Vim is written by an author who cares about a higher cause than just this software application.
- Vim has its roots in terminals and consoles, which means that people who need to do a lot of cool things shaped it.
- Vim comes with reams of documentation where you can find out how to do anything. (As long as someone else points you to the page number. ;)
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