Vim

Vim running in a terminal emulator
Original author(s)	Bram Moolenaar
Initial release	November 2, 1991; 20 years ago  (November 2, 1991)[1]
Stable release	7.3.353  (2011-10-26) [±]
Preview release	Patch 7.3.462  (2012-03-01) [±]
Written in	C and Vimscript
Platform	Cross-platform: Unix, Linux, Microsoft Windows, iOS, Android
Available in	English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Persian, Polish, Russian, Spanish[2]
Type	Text editor
License	Free software, charityware
Website	http://www.vim.org/

Vim is a text editor written by Bram Moolenaar and first released publicly in 1991. Based on the vi editor common to Unix-like systems, Vim is designed for use both from a command line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface. Vim is free and open source software and is released under a license that includes some charityware clauses, encouraging users who enjoy the software to consider donating to children in Uganda.^[3] The license is compatible with the GNU General Public License.

Although Vim was originally released for the Amiga, Vim has since been developed to be cross-platform, supporting many other platforms. In 2006, it was voted the most popular editor amongst Linux Journal readers.^[4]

History[link]

Bram Moolenaar began working on Vim for the Amiga computer in 1988. Moolenaar first publicly released Vim (v1.14) in 1991.^[5] Vim was based on an earlier editor, Stevie, for the Atari ST,^[1] created by Tim Thompson, Tony Andrews and G.R. (Fred) Walter.^{[citation needed]}

The name "Vim" is an acronym for "Vi IMproved"^[6] because Vim is an extended version of the vi editor, with many additional features designed to be helpful in editing program source code. Originally, the acronym stood for "Vi IMitation", but that was changed with the release of Vim 2.0 in December 1993.^[7] A later comment states that the reason for changing the name was that Vim's feature set surpassed that of vi.^[8]

Interface[link]

Graphical Vim under GTK+ 2.

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.

Vim has a built-in tutorial for beginners (accessible through the "vimtutor" command). There is also the Vim Users' Manual that details Vim's features. This manual can be read from within Vim, or found online.^[9][10]

Vim also has a built-in help facility (using the :help command) that allows users to query and navigate through commands and features.

Customization[link]

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.^[11] Vim also supports scripting using Lua (as of Vim 7.3), Perl, Python, Racket^[12] (formerly PLT Scheme), Ruby, and Tcl.

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.

[edit] Features and improvements over vi

Vim has a vi compatibility mode but when not in this mode Vim has many enhancements over vi.^[13] However, even in compatibility mode, Vim is not 100% compatible with vi as defined in the Single Unix Specification^[14] and POSIX (e.g., Vim does not support vi's open mode, only visual mode). Vim has nevertheless been described as “very much compatible with Vi”.^[15]

Some of Vim's enhancements include completion, comparison and merging of files (known as vimdiff), a comprehensive integrated help system, extended regular expressions, scripting languages (both native and through alternative scripting interpreters such as Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, etc.) including support for plugins, a graphical user interface (known as gvim), limited integrated development environment-like features, mouse interaction (both with and without the GUI), folding, editing of compressed or archived files in gzip, bzip2, zip, and tar format and files over network protocols such as SSH, FTP, and HTTP, session state preservation, spell checking, split (horizontal and vertical) and tabbed windows, unicode and other multi-language support, syntax highlighting, trans-session command, search, and cursor position histories, multiple level undo/redo history which can persist across editing sessions, and visual mode.

Availability[link]

Whereas vi was originally available only on Unix operating systems, Vim has been ported to many operating systems including AmigaOS (the initial target platform), Atari MiNT, BeOS, DOS, Microsoft Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Server 2003/Vista/Server 2008/7, IBM OS/2 and OS/390, MorphOS, OpenVMS, QNX, RISC OS, Unix, Linux, BSD, and Mac OS.^[16] Also, Vim is shipped with every copy of Apple Mac OS X.^[17]

Vim is available for Apple iOS, and can be installed on iPhones and iPads via the Apple App Store.^[18] It is also available through Cydia on jailbroken Apple devices running iOS.^[19] Vim has been independently compiled for Android, although it can only run on rooted devices as of July 2011.^[20]

Release history[link]

See also[link]

	Free software portal
	Computer programming portal

• Comparison of text editors
• Editor war
• List of text editors
• List of Unix programs
• Vimperator

References[link]

External links[link]

The Wikibook Learning the vi Editor has a page on the topic of Vim

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Vim

• Official website
• Online Vim documentation
• Online Vim help pages
• Vi IMproved - Vim, by Steve Oualline and errata.
• Books, complete list
• Vim Introduction and Tutorial

Look up vim in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Vim or VIM may refer to:

• Vim (cleaning product)
• Vim (text editor)
• VIM Airlines
• Vim Comedy Company, a movie studio
• Vim Records
• Vickers VIM, an aircraft
• Vimentin, a protein
• International vocabulary of metrology
• Vendor Independent Messaging, an e-mail API
• Voyager Interstellar Mission, a space mission
• "Vim", a song by Machine Head on the album Through the Ashes of Empires

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

An example of a text editor, Vim

A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files.

Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code.

Plain text files vs. word processor files[link]

There are important differences between plain text files created by a text editor, and document files created by word processors such as Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, or OpenOffice.org.

• A plain text file uses a simple character set such as ASCII to represent numbers, letters, and a small number of symbols. The only non-printing characters in the file, usable to format the text, are newline, tab, and formfeed. Plain text files are usually used for programming and configuration, and rarely for documents to be read by a person.
• Word processor documents generally contain formatted text, adding content that enables text to appear in boldface and italics, to use multiple fonts, and to be structured into columns and tables. These capabilities were once associated only with desktop publishing, but are now common in the simplest word processor. Web pages add HTML tags to plain text to achieve formatting.

When both formats are available, the user must select with care. Saving a plain text file in a word-processor format will add formatting information that could disturb the machine-readability of the text. Saving a word-processor document as a text file will lose formatting information.

History[link]

A box of punched cards with several program decks.

Before text editors existed, computer text was punched into punched cards with keypunch machines. The text was carried as a physical box of these thin cardboard cards, and read into a card-reader. Magnetic tape or disk "card-image" files created from such card decks often had no line-separation characters at all, commonly assuming fixed-length 80-character records. An alternative to cards was punched paper tape, generated by teletype (TTY) machines; these did need special characters to indicate ends of records.

The first text editors were line editors oriented to teletype- or typewriter- style terminals, which did not provide a window or screen-oriented display. They usually had very short commands (to minimize typing) that reproduced the current line. Among them were a command to print a selected section(s) of the file on the typewriter (or printer) in case of necessity. An "edit cursor", an imaginary insertion point, could be moved by special commands that operated with line numbers of specific text strings (context). Later, the context strings were extended to regular expressions. To see the changes, the file needed to be printed on the printer. These "line-based text editors" were considered revolutionary improvements over keypunch machines. In case typewriter-based terminals were not available, they were adapted to keypunch equipment. In this case the user needed to punch the commands into the separate deck of cards and feed them into the computer in order to edit the file.

When computer terminals with video screens became available, screen-based text editors (sometimes termed just "screen editors") became common. One of the earliest "full screen" editors was O26 - which was written for the operator console of the CDC 6000 series machines in 1967. Another early full screen editor is vi. Written in the 1970s, vi is still a standard editor^[1] for Unix and Linux operating systems. Vi and Emacs are popular editors on these systems. The productivity of editing using full-screen editors (compared to the line-based editors) motivated many of the early purchases of video terminals.

Types of text editors[link]

Some text editors are small and simple, while others offer broad and complex functions. For example, Unix and Unix-like operating systems have the vi editor (or a variant), but many also include the Emacs editor. Microsoft Windows systems come with the simple Notepad, though many people—especially programmers—prefer another Windows text editor with more features. Under Apple Macintosh's classic Mac OS there was the native SimpleText, which was replaced under Mac OS X by TextEdit. Some editors, such as WordStar, have dual operating modes allowing them to be either a text editor or a word processor.

Text editors for professional users can edit files of arbitrary sizes, such as log files or unusually large texts, such as an entire dictionary placed in a single file. Simpler text editors may just read files into the computer's main memory. On larger files, this may be a slow process, and the entire file might not fit. Some text editors do not let the user start editing until this read-in is complete.

"Programmable editors" can be customized for specific uses. For example, Emacs can be customized by programming in Lisp. One motive for customizing is to make a text editor use the commands of another text editor with which the user is more familiar.

An important group of programmable editors uses REXX as the scripting language. These "orthodox editors" let the user open a "command line" into which commands and REXX statements can be typed. Most such editors are derivatives of XEDIT, IBM's editor for VM/CMS. Among them are THE, Kedit, SlickEdit, X2, Uni-edit, UltraEdit, and Sedit. Some vi derivatives such as Vim also support folding as well as macro languages, and also have a command line.

A text editor written or customized for a specific use can sense what the user is editing and assist the user, often by providing simple ways to retrieve related information. Many text editors for software developers include source code syntax highlighting and automatic completion to make programs easier to read and write. Programming editors often let the user select the name of a subprogram or variable, and then jump to its definition and back. Often an auxiliary utility like ctags is used to locate the definitions.

Typical features[link]

• String searching algorithm – search string with a replacement string. Different methods are employed, Global(ly) Search And Replace, Conditional Search and Replace, Unconditional Search and Replace.
• Cut, copy, and paste – most text editors provide methods to duplicate and move text within the file, or between files.
• Text formatting – Text editors often provide basic formatting features like line wrap, auto-indentation, bullet list formatting, comment formatting, and so on.
• Undo and redo – As with word processors, text editors will provide a way to undo and redo the last edit. Often—especially with older text editors—there is only one level of edit history remembered and successively issuing the undo command will only "toggle" the last change. Modern or more complex editors usually provide a multiple level history such that issuing the undo command repeatedly will revert the document to successively older edits. A separate redo command will cycle the edits "forward" toward the most recent changes. The number of changes remembered depends upon the editor and is often configurable by the user.
• Data transformation – Reading or merging the contents of another text file into the file currently being edited. Some text editors provide a way to insert the output of a command issued to the operating system's shell.
• Ability to handle UTF-8 encoded text.
• Filtering – Some advanced text editors allow the editor to send all or sections of the file being edited to another utility and read the result back into the file in place of the lines being "filtered". This, for example, is useful for sorting a series of lines alphabetically or numerically, doing mathematical computations, and so on.
• Syntax highlighting – contextually highlights software code and other text that appears in an organized or predictable format.

Specialised editors[link]

Some editors include special features and extra functions, for instance,

• Source code editors are text editors with additional functionality to facilitate the production of source code. These often feature user-programmable syntax highlighting, and coding tools or keyboard macros similar to an HTML editor (see below).
• Folding editors. This subclass includes so-called "orthodox editors" that are derivatives of Xedit. The specialized version of folding is usually called outlining (see below).
• IDEs (integrated development environments) are designed to manage and streamline larger programming projects. They are usually only used for programming as they contain many features unnecessary for simple text editing.
• World Wide Web programmers are offered a variety of text editors dedicated to the task of web development. These create the plain text files that deliver web pages. HTML editors include: Dreamweaver, E Text Editor, Microsoft FrontPage, HotDog, Homesite, Nvu, Tidy, and GoLive. Many offer the option of viewing a work in progress on a built-in web browser. XML editors share many traits.
• Mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists often produce articles and books using TeX or LaTeX in plain text files. Such documents are often produced by a standard text editor, but some people use specialized TeX editors.
• Outliners. Also called tree-based editors, because they combine a hierarchical outline tree with a text editor. Folding (see above) can generally be considered a generalized form of outlining.
• Simultaneous editing is a technique in End-user development research to edit all items in a multiple selection. It allows the user to manipulate all the selected items at once through direct manipulation. The Lapis text editor^[2][3] and the multi edit^[4] plugin for gedit are examples of this technique. The Lapis editor can also create an automatic multiple selection based on an example item.
• Distraction-free editors provide a minimalistic interface with the purpose of isolating the writer from the rest of the applications and operating system, thus being able to focus on the writing alone.

See also[link]

• Collaborative editor
• List of text editors
• Comparison of text editors
• Editor war
• File viewer – does not change file, faster for very large files
• Hex editor – used for editing binary files
• Stream editor – used for non-interactive editing

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• Text editor info for beginners at text-editor.org
• The text editor wiki
• Orthodox Editors as a Special Class of Advanced Editors, discusses Xedit and its clones with an emphasis of folding capabilities and programmability.

Look up text in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Text may refer to:

• the representation of written language
• Text (literary theory), a concept in literary theory
• Text (song), a 2010 song by Mann
• TEXT, a Swedish band formed by 3/4 ex-Refused Members
• Textbook, a standardized instructional book
• Plain text (unformatted text) in computing
• Text file, a type of computer files
• Text display, an electronic alphanumeric display device
• Text mode display
• Text messaging, the sending of short messages by mobile phone
• Text segment, another name for the code segment of a binary executable computer file
• A particular Bible passage, sometimes a single verse or verse fragment
• Another name for a literary work
• TxT (film), a 2006 Filipino horror film.

See also[link]

• Enriched text

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.