Vim Celebrates 20 Years - Happy Birthday Vim !

20 years ago this day (November 2), Bram Moolenaar created Vim - an improved version of Vi text editor found in most Unix systems. Since then, Vim has flourished to become the Swiss army knife of text editors. The latest version of Vim is 7.3 which was released a little over a year ago. Vim is truly cross platform and works on Unix, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
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Learn To Use Vim Text Editor The Easy Way

Vim is an enhanced version of the ever popular command line text editor vi. If you master the use of Vim text editor, it can be a very powerful tool in your hands, and allow you to do amazing text editing feats with just a few taps on your keyboard.

In 2007, this site had conducted a poll, and over 50% of the respondents said their favorite text editor is Vi.

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Be Productive Using Vim - Learn These 101 Hacks

I have always been an avid Vi enthusiast. And I have tried to keep abreast of the new features in Vi. Did you know Vi has a powerful adversary ? Yes you guessed it right, it is Emacs. But that has not stopped Vi from gaining faithful followers for itself. Myself being one of the staunch supporters of Vi.

Vim is the modern avataar of Vi and is created and maintained by Bram Moolenaar. Vim is choke full of features which would put any other text editor (except perhaps Emacs) to shame.
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Roundup of Vim Articles

Regular readers of this blog may be aware of the numerous Vim related articles that were posted here. Notable among them being a concise tutorial on using Vim, the new features of Vim 7.0, making Vim behave like an ordinary text editor (Cream for Vim), a talk given by Bram Moolenaar on the Seven habits of effective text editing and Increasing your productivity using Vim, just to name a few.

More over, over a year back, 50% of this blog readers polled Vim/Vi as the favourite text editor of their choice.

Now here is another resource for Vim/Vi enthusiasts. Nicola Paolucci has collected 10 classic Vim articles which (he claims) transformed him from a Vim hater to a Vim lover. Check out his collection. Perhaps you as well might experience a mind shift towards Vim - my all time favourite text editor.

Over 10 power user tips for Vim editor

After using Vi or Vim for a couple of days, ever been left wondering what is it that makes Vi enthusiasts sing eulogies of this geeky text editor ? Then here are a number of reasons which will make you wonder why you hadn't embraced Vim sooner.

Swaroop C H has compiled over 10 specific ways to improve your productivity with Vim. These are the same functionality he found in Emacs and for which he provides equivalent commands in Vim.

The tips include :

Swapping caps-lock and Control keys, using incremental search for navigation, Making better use of the buffers in Vim, mastering vim regular expressions and picking up fine grained text manipulation commands in Vim among many others.

Most of the settings he lists can be made permanent by entering them in your .vimrc configuration file which resides in your home directory in Linux. Of course, if you are still putoff then there is another project called Cream for Vim which will save the day for you.

Apart from providing the power user tips, he also lists some additional plugins which further extends the functionality of this wonderful editor. Do read his tips to know more.

7 Habits for effective text editing 2.0

Being a Vi enthusiast, I am always on the look out for articles related to Vi, or rather Vi's modern avatar Vim - the versatile text editor created by Bram Moolenaar. In the past, this blog has seen a number of posts related to Vim. In fact if you ask me, the proverb "Too much of a thing" doesn't hold true for Vim.

It can easily take you a life time to learn each and every aspect of Vim though in most cases you can get along quite well by mastering just a couple of Vi commands. The sheer number of features and the permutations and combinations are that many. Then you have branched projects which aim to make Vim much more easier for the average computer user. Cream for Vim being a case to the point.

Today I stumbled upon this video which explains the 7 Habits for effective text editing in Vim which I found informative. The video is one of the series of Google TechTalks. In this video, Bram Moolenaar himself talks on the most efficient ways of editing text in Vim. The regular readers of this blog will know that Bram Moolenaar now works for Google.

The preamble of Google TechTalks goes thus :

Google TeckTalks are designed to disseminate a wide spectrum of views on topics including Current Affairs, Science, Medicine, Engineering, Business, Humanities, Law, Entertainment, and the Arts.

The video is a bit large (over 500 MB in size) and stretches over 1 hour. So make sure you have the required bandwidth to view the video. It is every bit worth watching.

How to use Tabs in Vim Text Editor

Vim is a very powerful text editor created by Bram Moolenaar. Vim is so versatile that it can even be used as a plug-in in Microsoft Visual Studio.

If you are interested in learning how to use Vim editor, then check out the following resources :Read more »