[...]... common editor at that time, ex Ex was, in turn, an extension of the Unix editor 'ed' The name 'vi' is actually an abbreviation of 'visual in ex' As the name indicates, vi was actually just a command that started the ex editor in one of its modes the visual mode Vi was one of the first editors to introduce the concept of modality What this means is that the editor has different modes for different tasks—one... this was that Vim went beyond simply being a clone of vi for a different platform, to becoming a competitor The development of Vim was quick and fast, and soon Vim had a range of features that the original vi editor did not have Because of this, the abbreviation Vim was at some point changed into being Vi-IMproved instead of Vi-IMitation Within a couple of years, Vim grew to having a range of features... Chapter 1 The latest version of the nvi editor can always be found here: http://www.bostic.com/vi/ Vim The editor Vim is the golden child of the vi family Ever since Bram Moolenaar released the first version of Vim to the public in November 1991, this editor has evolved into one of the most feature-rich editors around The first version of Vim was, like the Elvis editor, based on the source code of the. .. addition to the feature set of Vim, because it would normally have required coding in a lower-level language and recompilation of the editor in order to add even simple features A lot of features have been added to Vim throughout the last decade, and many of these are quite unique compared to the other editors and vi clones in particular Here we will list just a few of the more distinct features of Vim, ... to adopt Vim as an alternative to vi Even if the users thought they used vi (if they actually executed the vi command) they opened Vim (the vi command had simply been substituted with a link to the vim command, which has often lead to the misunderstanding that vi and Vim are actually the same program) During the late 90s, Vim took over where vi was lacking behind in the so-called editor- war that existed... friend and help you with your daily tasks But what makes an editor good? Looking at the different editors available, we see that some of them try to be the best editor by developers adding features they think the users need Others have accepted that they are not the best editor and instead try to be the simplest most, user-friendly, or fastest-loading editor around With the Vim editor, no one has decided... what's best for you Instead you are given the opportunity to modify a large range of settings to make Vim fit your needs This means that the power is in the hands of the user, rather than the hands of the developers of the editor Some settings have to do with the actual layout of Vim (e.g colors and menus), while others change areas that affect how we work with Vim like key bindings that map certain... not a clone at all Vile is actually an attempt to bring the best of two worlds together in one editor: the modality of vi and the feature set of Emacs This also explains the name Vile, which is short for "VI Like Emacs." The Vile editor project was started by Paul Fox during the summer of 1990 The code was based on the core code from the public-domain editor MicroEmacs Paul then modified it to have... configuration files well organized and retain your Vim configuration across computers by storing a copy of it online What You Need for This Book Over the course of the last decade, Vim has evolved into a feature-rich editor This means that the some of the features from the later versions of Vim are not accessible in the older versions of Vim Vim is available for a wide variety of platforms and not all... that a lot of vi users missed This made more and more users switch over to using Vim instead of vi as their primary editor In 1998, the fifth generation of Vim was released, and with it one of the most used features of today, scripting, was introduced Now, it was possible for the user to write their own scripts for Vim, and in that way expand the functionality of the editor This was a really strong addition . Bangera Technical Editor Ajay S Editorial Manager Dipali Chittar Project Manager Patricia Weir Project Coordinator Sagara Naik Indexer Bhushan Pangaonkar Proofreader Chris Smith Layouts and Illustrations. gure out new ways to optimize their applications. This was also the case with the text editors of that time. One of the most popular editors of that time was an editor called Vim. It was optimized. out a year later and right away, it started to become an alternative to the vi editor. The combination of a more liberal licensing model and the fact that Vim started to become a superset of