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. 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.

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

The name "Vim" is an acronym for "Vi IMproved" 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. A later comment states that the reason for changing the name was that Vim's feature set surpassed that of vi.

Vim or VIM may refer to:

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.

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.

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.

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.