Why vim over emacs

My most frustrating moments were when the caps lock key was on. You could try with gVim, but one of the biggest advantages with vi and Emacs is the ability to do neat stuff while keeping your hands on the keyboard, and gVim is likely to keep you using the mouse. Learning to play roguelike games at the same time gave me practice with the cursor movement keys, but caused me to try to move diagonally in documents sometimes.

Emacs is probably more approachable. It's modeless, and you aren't going to screw yourself up by hitting the caps lock key. Again, versions that allow you to use the mouse do you few favors in the long run. Both require some level of expertise to use effectively. Unlike, say, Notepad, you can't just sit down and edit. Both are configurable, although for my money writing extensions in the same Lisp the editor is written in makes a smoother experience.

Emacs, as normally distributed, isn't really an editor. It's a Lisp environment tailored for text processing, with a lot of pre-written software, including an editor. Hence the joke "Emacs makes a decent shell, but it could use a better editor. I normally use Vim because, after extensive training, it feels easier. This may be due to advantages in the mode system, where immense numbers of commands are available using one finger near the home rows, or "baby duck syndrome", which applies very much to editors: once you learn a good one, you generally stick to it.

The main reason I do use vi is that it's available almost everywhere. I happen to think that the "vim is modal" comment above is incorrect. Vim has commands. You can do "11aNow is the time for all good men..

That's a command, not a mode. But there's actually a very basic difference in Vim commands vs Emacs commands. So Emacs has an advantage that a lot of other things bash, gnuplot, zsh, ksh some others I can't think of off the top of my head all end up implementing Emacs-style line editing.

I used to use Emacs, but I found gVim to generally work faster on slower machines, plus, due to its POSIX requirement, vi is available almost everywhere. I started out using Emacs, because it was easier to use for a novice user. I found usage of nano to be quite error prone for some reason, and at some point I realized I'm much more comfortable with using vi.

Right now, it's a mixture. I use Eclipse and gedit quite often, too. Vim, however, is still my favorite and most used editor. I use both gVim and Emacs well enough to be productive, though I am expert in neither. One thing I can say with certainty is that Vim and gVim run faster on my Windows 7 laptop which I have to use at work. Emacs, on the Windows box, has an odd habit of "pausing" for up to minute and becoming unresponsive, even while continuing to accept keyboard input, before spitting out everything accumulated in the keyboard buffer in a rush.

This does not happen in Mac OS or Linux. Nonetheless I find myself using Vim or gVim most of the time on all platforms just so I don't have to stop and think about which editor I am using and adjust. Bottom line: in my opinion both editors are powerful enough to handle any and all text editing needs. The choice should be based on practical considerations like platform implementation specifics , and working style.

Main difference between Emacs and Vim is ergonomic. There is carpal tunnel syndrome, CTS, as you know. Vim - not, you can read about this difference in many places. For ex. In Emacs - you can not :. I had to physically remove the internal pc speaker before eventually found that buried-ref about how to do it :. The cons of both of these are that they are both old school. I've used probably 50 different editors over the years from Basic line editors, to super fast assembly coded editors VEDIT for one , to fancy GUI editors, some better than others.

I've even written my own special editor called ForthStar and adapted it to edit a tree of btrieve leaves, with multiple indexes for powerful searching, like to instantly find the last leaves I just edited, or to quickly find code components, or leaf parents or children. I think both vi and emacs are more religion than muscle. The creative minds that built them have largely moved on, and the new support lacks the courage and skill to re-invent them.

Both are stuck in difficult keyboard layouts. Emacs could adjust to the user a bit, at a minimum by recognizing that there is an Alt key rather than the antique Meta. Better to just simply have one that is fired by either key combo. Yes you can alter key bindings, but then what a mess you have later. Almost any other GUI ap these days allows zoom with the mouse wheel.

Emacs GUI doesn't seem to get this to work. And where's the nice greeking like what Kate has? My favorite keyboard layout over the years was Wordstar's cursor diamond.

At least it was easy to learn and made sense immediately. The one I hated the most was WordPerfect which increased complexity and seems to have been based somewhat on emacs. Let's face it most of the world has GUI these days. And like it or not text editors are somewhat stuck in their age.

I think it would be better to have a universal editor that could easily switch between emacs, vi, wordstar, or whatever key layouts, and without loosing the more powerful commands it has to offer. Real programmers have to use a variety of editing tools.

Why not have an editor which meets our needs to get work done rather than to force us into their way of doing things? Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams?

Learn more. What are the pros and cons of Vim and Emacs? Asked 11 years, 2 months ago. Active 3 years, 7 months ago. Viewed k times. Improve this question. Duplicate of SO question: stackoverflow. I'm surprised nobody has mentioned XKCD Show 4 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. I cannot agree with the point "More than an editor". Vim has also many plugins, including ones that turn it into a file manager or an IDE like vim-latex.

This made me feel small Read email? Check your RSS feed? I don't think you can deny that Emacs is just plain more powerful, though the usefulness of that power depends on what you're looking for. The power is unlimited, trust me. Which one is still useful? The reason experts continue using the tools they trained on is because they are experts.

And, so, she goes back to the violin. Text editing is insanely efficient in vim once you have the right plugins in place. For git integration, vim-fugitive is excellent so much so that when I do have to use IDEs I still switch to vim for staging hunks of code and resolving merge conflicts. By doing so, instead of dropping my pinky to the CTRL key constantly not a comfortable key to hit , I can stay in the home row all day without tiring myself out.

Food for thought…. I use Vim for the last 5 years, with some plugins, and I love Vim. I have linters, git integration, colors preview in CSS. I have experience with IntelliJ products, Atom, VSCode, but I love that Vim is easy on system resources also saves the battery , can be found everywhere, effective.

And Vim is free, open source. I usually see a demo with some feature that looks like the killer one that will make this IDE my new favorite too. I have always come back to vim for several reasons and I would imagine, emacs users will say the same.

It may work a bit different but in the end gets the same result. Anyone that has been developing software for more than a few years most likely has several languages under their belt. Even those with a good plugin architecture often work very different with each language. And adding each plugin usually adds a lot of overhead.

To master one tool instead of spending massive amounts of time always searching for the perfect IDE. And use that extra time to read articles on software development, design patterns, algorithms etc. Of course, IDEs have some support for keyboard shortcuts, but its as good as mouse support in Emacs. Its terrible. Its impossible to not use mouse in IDE and its impossible to not use keyboard shortcuts in emacs.

Second major Emacs advantage is its unparalleled extensibility and explorability. All emacsers use heavily customized Emacs to their needs because the price to do so is small. Both do the same thing, but latter a lot more effective. All of the GUI features are just noise and inefficiency from my perspective.

Most, if not all, of the revered features and plugins and features in VS Code and the like can be accomplished as competently, and probably more efficiently, with a little bit of Vim customisation.

Admittedly, the initial learning curve presents some challenges until you can fly, but once you get over that hump you really can fly. And for me, the grammar of Vim continually provides inspiration.

I think it has the best UI of any application I have ever used — seriously. I find it interesting how SpaceVim has made this attempt to get the best of both worlds. I only wish I could integrate that one idea from SpaceVim without also taking in all the rest of their config. This might be forgivable if it stopped there, but to go further and say:. You seem to have missed the part where Emacs can be integrated with absolutely anything. This quote is self-incriminating in a sense as it reveals the attitude that code is nothing but keystrokes, sold by the pound-per-minute and that refactoring is some indulgent sin.

Not just a clutch of text files that are fulfilling their purpose out of sheer coincidence, forever accruing complexity as changes are incrementally piled on in haste. I think of it as a risk to business continuity for the vast majority of companies out there. All to compensate for the absence of editor code awareness which — to me — is a metaphor for analysis and reflection. Inevitably, there are communication pains and gnawing deficiencies in onboarding that are either never organically encountered lucky!

I make use of Visual Studio Code as a notepad replacement or for small projects where the deliverable is more declarative than procedural terraform, docker compose. As noble as they are, text editor puritans are immediately at a disadvantage, even in the simplest of codebases. Use what you want in the end and show me that it can work in the merge reviews. More importantly though, we might even benefit from having to hear less about vim…. This resonates with me, although it comes from the other side.

It is a shame when, in one way or another, the project structure is affected by the personal choices of development tools. Developer should choose whatever tool they want, and configure the tool to do the job, rather than configure the job to suit the tool. Not only do I use vim, but I use pretty plain vim. Which kind of proves my point.

Again, proving my point. But my experience is that people waste too much time on them. You and your friends have never tried Docker? To grasp the nature of that you need to read between lines in the mind of their creators, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernigan, and others. The traditional tools available there editors included are fast, lean, stable, and have decades of work done to refine and perfect them, and they can easily be composed together to do anything you would want out of an IDE and more.

Learning new tools take time. Well, why not just an IDE then? By starting with Vim and adding plugins as I go along, I can try out alternatives and make my own choice. The result feels more like home, and reflects my manner of thinking. From time to time I change plugins, or throw some away.

My OS already has a terminal, file manager, and search tool; yet the IDE crams in their own versions of these. The terminal, filesystem tree, and console are all cramped. When I use a separate applications the OS is aware of them, so I can manage them using my window manager, task manager, and fuzzy-finder thing.

Of all my reasons for avoiding an IDE, this is the most important one. I use many of the keyboard shortcuts from bare Vim, and have a few leader-key mappings for some commands I use a lot. A I used to fire up NetBeans just for step debugging. Nowadays I use the Vim VDebug plugin. B Project-aware code navigation, and auto-suggestion. Nothing in the article backs this statement.

Personally, I think vim keyboard bindings are great. Interesting article. I come from an Emacs background but have recently switched to VS Code. I love Emacs and have done for two decades — the key bindings and customisability has meant I invested deeply in it. I will continue to use Emacs for text files. My blade Swiss Army Knife is in my toolbox — somewhere. I committed myself to mastering Vim during lockdown.

Can anyone master Vim fully? Refactoring in vanilla Vim is way harder, if you gotta get plugins for all the languages of choice, then better go for a full featured IDE.

That being said, I think knowing how to use Vim at a basic level is an essential skill, due to this omnipresence of the editor in Unix systems. Being able to code comfortable for a few minutes with Vim lets me do some quick hacks in servers without having to scp the content… develop in my full IDE and upload back.

Vim is very powerful indeed. And I highly appreciate its features when I require them. I have always been shocked at how little people who edit code for a living know about their editor — regardless which editor they choose. I doubt that this changes much with an IDE. I think the difference is if a team is required to use an IDE then someone else has made this all work for them and only through the IDE can they get necessary resources. That said, I put quite a bit of effort into getting Eclipse working at a company, and since I could not make it mandatory, no one started to use it.

Including me. It was too much trouble to keep it working just for myself, so I stuck with emacs. Do IDEs really make most coders more productive? I am not so sure. The folks that only know how to copy paste, search, and save are not commenting or even reading this thread, so we are really only preaching at the choir here. When I began to study programming, using vim for that as well came naturally, but I have been open to alternatives. I clicked this article expecting to learn some of what makes IDEs so useful, or maybe some advice for when to use an IDE over a text editor.

Instead I learned nothing. This article reads more like notes the authors took about the available options for code editing. Oh, and occasionally whatever that depraved stuff inside Excel is. Others have their entire build infrastructure locally. Installing random IDEs was not possible. Or I could open 3 ssh windows, one for vim, and the others for running the code and watching logs.

Vim is for people who like Unix, and who think in Unix ways. And just think of spacemacs, or neovim. So what remains of any of the quoted arguments then? Is maybe the IDE the lazy, dated way to code at the end?

Please scrap this, and try again when you actually looked at how advanced users use vim and emacs, and write a properly researched article and not just a hit piece. I love the shit out of Vim and use it all day, every day. But not for developing complex applications. IntelliJ is like having a co-pilot with you during development. It gives you true comfort. Vim however makes you feel like Neo in the matrix.

Like Jason Bourne in… well… Jason Bourne. It gives you true power. The often hide too much, leaving the developer with scant knowledge of or control over a lot of what is being executed. And where the IDE is for the purpose of facilitating untrained, unknowledgeable or inexperienced programmers, its use in high end technical computing is simply an oxymoron. The novice would do better to do it by hand, with make and an editor and learn how things work.

Why should I spend valuable time learning many different IDEs—IDEs that keep changing—when I can efficiently just use one or two familiar editors—editors where I know the keyboard shortcuts, etc, that empower rapid working. What I want is software developers to make it easy and obvious for me to interface their software with my choice of editor.

What is hard about that? PS I also want software developers to stop grabbing my entire screen, so that I can use windowing environment as I want, not as they want. No, really, he does. Nor is Vim. I had a much longer reply written up a day or two ago, but it looks like something ate it. Most IDEs promote mental laziness. They allow programmers to build programs that work with just a superficial understanding of the language facilities they use, with things like autocompletion.

In the end, a lot of those programs end up on Stack Overflow piece by piece because of an edge case, a race condition, or simply wrong logic. Once the necessary in-depth knowledge is acquired, the use of IDEs become unnecessary: you can simply be more productive than most IDE-users using any other editor. In short, IDEs help with the process of writing only, not with the quality of the end product. That still relies on old fashioned know-how.

I use Emacs exclusively for writing programs and switch to VScode for debugging only. Everybody has their own toolset they are comfortable with. I learnt programming in fancy editors and IDEs.

Eventually I was forced to work in a plain tty for some weeks and I knew about the existence of Emacs and Vim, but never got serious about them. I quickly read the differences between them and decided to go with Vim.

I was amazed by how much stuffs I was able to do in a terminal. Vim made it easy and provided me with an abundance of ways to browse and edit my code. I know about all those fancy editors. But the vi way of editing code is amazingly efficient and fun to use. They are just great. The author of the Medium article is using Atom with Vim keybindings. This article does not make any sense at all. But you see, people with vim use git, they use linters, they use modern languages and they use a lot of features from modern IDEs.

So somehow everything has changed, but vim survived. And the reason vim survived should be the fact that people do not like switching to new things? That is why people still use ed… oh wait that one is dead, maybe it is too old? So surly there is still Netbeans? Yeah but the market share is pretty low. And that is not the only example. There are very few tools which a development team actually need to agree on.

Most other tools can be left to personal choice. The same goes for your choice of file manager, window manager, SQL client, diff tool, terminal, input devices, log viewer, and what-not. In my experience the most important thing was finding a colour scheme and font size that we could all read comfortably. Did you saw a dev who really know vim editing code? This tool is pure efficiency, once you grasp the concept you can never go back. The speed and mental resting you get from using vim is and always will be worth the investment.

After reading the article, I really wonder if any of the authors use some regular IDE, because arguments written in the article are wrong or at least biased. There is also default configuration that can be changed and exported if needed. Really — installation and configuration of IDE in comparison to configuration of development environment built around command line and text editor is extremely fast and easy.

Availability and quality of tools like code completion, refactoring, code formatting, debuggers, profilers etc. How are they defining IDE? Unfortunately, it became unusable, not even reinstalling my OS install from scratch helped. It will take a while for me to get a me a replacement laptop, so, I had to use something lighter. Even VS Code was weirdly slow. I decided to code from an EC2 instance we have for development and running services. After installing nvim and searching for some plugins, I configured coc-nvim, fzf and other ones.

I was surprised with how good it was as an IDE. Autocomplete worked just like in VS Code, syntax check was better because the EC2 instance is very very fast , go to definition and find references worked like a charm. It took me a while to make it work like I wanted it to I like to config small details to my liking , and the only thing that still sucks is Java development with Bazel: IDEA is still the only feasible choice.

But for JS and Python development, Vim is pretty good. Sorry, this post is a little malformed. One is tabs vs buffers, in vim you can have different split layouts for every tab. The new search editor in Vscode is promising though. Go to definition using ctags. RubyMine in this case has the most amazing go to definition tool. Unfortunately, such disinformation brings a lot of harm to other programmers.

Well, I lost 12 years of effectiveness because of such articles. XCode is something like 40 gigs now, Vim is probably a couple megabytes, including a scripting language interpreter for customizability. And none of the vim plugins for the major IDEs actually give you full vim functionality recursive macros are especially rare.

But the most important mistake, I think, is assuming that old but still actively developed software is bad and anything new is good. I actually started coding in Emacs by requirement, having come from Matlab and Eclipse because the toolchain for Fortran90 is basically non-existant in modern IDEs. I predate VSCode by about 3 years, and when I started doing more Python than anything else, I moved into Pycharm for a couple of years. However, like most Pycharm users, while I liked its interface, I found its toolchain to be laggy, its design unintuitive and ultimately, it tied you to a particular set of products which meant that if you learnt the interface for one, you were stuck in their ecosystem.

Otherwise, I will use VSCode. The first advantage of Vim and Emacs is just that — a universal interface to coding. The second is their combined suite. The Emacs community long since conquered modal editing and in fact the main modified distros come almost exclusively designed for modal editing and leader keys.

Both have fully functional, well supported implementations of the LSP protocol, as well as faster, more conventional alternatives like rtags. Third, IDE information overload. That makes them push a lot of information on a developer, and because they are doing this and the toolchain outputs a lot more information than any GUI can contain, they ignore the actual toolchain behind it.

Emacs handles this by providing a general interface to similar capability for every language it knows. Fourth, modal editing. Vim or evil-mode is the only way you should be editing code.

The ability to pick a word, or a line, or 10 lines, and just kill whole regions, moving them around, undoing and redoing with a literate undo tree and without ever using your mouse is incredible. Vim and Emacs naturally allow you to ignore your mouse almost completely, so are natural extensions of this practice. Fifth, it gently introduces you to the actual toolchain.

Well, you can use rtags, the legacy system, the inbuilt dumb autocompletion, or any of the language servers available on the Unix platform. Or you can use nothing. The main disadvantage is that it never works straight out of the box, but in programming almost nothing ever does. I disagree with the article a lot. I at first also thought using vim nowadays is kinda crazy and more suited for OPS guys living in the shell all day every day.

But once I got a taste of what Vim can do, and of the perspective of never having to leave my keyboard for mouse again, there was no going back. I still use other IDEs every day thought with some vim plugins usually for server side coding, while I use vim for frontend or maintenance tasks fully. I just use the tool that I feel more productive with, or as in case of vim, I see the productivity curve going up in the future.

Yes, after 1 year of using vim, I still feel that I have blind spots and I have a lot more room to improve using more of vim features, or that many things were somewhat easier in IDEs, but still using Vim feels great.

I never had this fun feeling with other IDEs. Intellij Idea. Especially if your hardware is somewhat limited yeah, it can still happen nowadays , performance is yet another reason to switch to more light weight tools like Vim or I guess Emacs. Lot of people love to use full blown IDEs and I totally get it. But frankly speaking, if eg. NotePad exaggerating here makes you productive, why not use it? Whatever floats your boat. And yes, we vim users get some crap from our colleagues, but I actually find that very funny and it only makes me want to get better in using my tools.

I see people having different preferences while still maintaining productivity, and I also see old tools refusing to die, and in fact continuing to thrive old is gold , and it is frigging awesome to observe. Vim and Emacs are not dinosaur editors for dinosaur programmers.

I can have autocomplete suggestions and my project tree in vim, just like the features in a graphical IDE. Another thing about vim and emacs is I can run them over anything, on anything.

I can run them over an SSH connection if I want, i could do it on a terminal emulator, or over an old serial display. And I want to stay in my terminal, too. So if I want to test my code I quickly save, go to terminal, then build and run my program. In this scenario, I know exactly what the build process is, because I set it up.

This makes it more universal, so if I send the code to a friend they know how to build it too regardless of their IDE. This post is clearly trying to start an argument. I use vim because I want to stay in my terminal, I like keybinds, and its the most productive for me. My hands never leaves the keyboard and the code just flows onto the screen. I use Vim for a few years coding occasionally for fun and pleasure.

It is so great because it is just what you want it to be. I have a great desire of not seeing all the icons, text, features, just the black screen with some code. No toolbars no clutter, no asking for anything, just extremely efficient operation.

If plugins ant fireworks are required they can be added, sometimes with a lot of trouble and frustration. Like a knife with a restaurant grade kitchen in the handle. Or even simpler I can record a key sequence as a macro.

For example. In a modern IDE of the future i could triple click on a line, right click, find and choose copy, move the mouse, line it up oh so carefully, right click and choose paste. The reproduction is perfect, it will even copy any formatting. There is a bit more joy in the simplicity of this, even though the reproduction may not be as perfect without formatting, but it is good enough really. Or then, I could be extremely antiquated and use the Proterozoic technique of old fashioned sex.

Personally i am a relative newbie to this 1. Sometimes, the older ways are simply better. There is only two reason why people use vim; because you ssh into a terminal or something or because you just want to tell folks you use vim in an attempt to sound superior. Updating large blocks of code or working on multiple files through VIM is just an annoying headache. Atom makes this work pretty seamlessly.

The only takeaway from this comment is the stark evidence of your lack of Vim experience. I would vouch that every sentence in this comment is incorrect. Yes, of course the bloated IDE is more customizable than bare-bones infinitely expandable editors with tons of packages made over the last 30 years.

I use the same emacs environment even the same session to build code in different projects. Use the right tool for the job. The Windows bias of the authors in this article is astoundingly overbearing. This article brings the editor wars into the modern era, and brings to light the essential character of all such holy wars: culture. Talk about refusing to change, being stuck in the past, and all the things the authors of this article accuse vim and emacs users of. The hypocrisy is as bad as the bias.

I say you should learn those and be comfortable with them. I work with someone who primarily uses vim. As programmers, we generally embrace automation and love tools that CAN help us be more productive. Why does having an IDE that does this, for some people at least, get overlooked here? I prefer vim in this case and use it all the time — very quick and great for opening something on the fly, finding text, doing a quick edit, etc.

I often treat it like a great investigative tool. So there you go. If you have something say, please keep the criticism constructive. You can just go to work. I am not particularly good at using vi, but I can get a job done. When you move around a lot, and you have to produce for pay, you need a sure thing, and vi is that sure thing when it comes to editing text files.

What a lot of prejudiced drivel. I love scripting in ba sh, but then found Perl, which I found ugly. Then found Ruby. Ah, home at last! Ah, home at last. I do devops, have a lapsed AWS certification, and embrace the cloud.

Throughout my career, vi, then as someone else has pointed out, silently vim. None have seemed as logical and intuitive as vi m. They have enjoyed using vi. I have no problem with change, actually. What I have a problem with is arrogant idiots, young and inexperienced or otherwise. This article is uninformed, pejorative, inflammatory.

Nothing to see here. Move along. Wrong, again. IDEs should help you but not dictate how to make things work. The trouble with IDEs like visual studio is that they create solutions for you then behind the scenes would add alot of scaffolding just to make things work.

In time these scaffolding will be obsolete and may cause compatibility issues. Instead of worrying about the feature program we end up worrying about the scaffolding. The good thing about lower level IDEs or just plain editors is that nothing is hidden from you and you would clearly understand what is going on. When I started to use Linux, I quickly discovered Kate and fell in love with it, even though it fell way short of the ideals it promised to deliver on and it fulfilled those promises over the years.

About a year later, I saw presentations on the power of Vim, and I started using Vim myself — and I fell in love with it, and have been using it ever since even though I still have a great admiration for Emacs. I do not use Vim because I am old-fashioned, and resist change. I encourage anyone who is interested in NVIM to give it a try because you may find in it what you are looking for, but I think for most lovers of Open Source and software development, VS Code is a better option.

So I went into a long odyssey to see if I wanted to use NVIM, unfortunately or at least not so much because now I know what nvim is I started using it. As for shortcuts, both offer you the tools for super-fast editing manual, snippets, jump-to function, etc. Here everyone chooses an editor for pleasure rather than for any compelling reason. Personally I would stick with VS Code in this field, for two reasons: with a single IDE I can work and program in my spare time, vs code really is very reliable for now.

It was here that I decided to stop using NVIM, despite having a fairly advanced configuration, and my goal was to improve the fluency with which I was already working in VS Code thanks to extensions, shortcuts, VS Code integrations, etc.

In VS Code when there is no extension or answer in stackOverflow that meets your need, you can easily make one or make an extension, but I feel that with NVIM it is different. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

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In my opinion, Vim is the best text editor out there due to a combination of other factors. Let's take a look at those below.

Vim is everywhere. It's installed by default in most Linux distributions. If not, you can install it using your distribution's package manager.

In addition, many distributions include Vim goodies such as plugins, extensions, and dictionaries with their standard package manager. Vim is also available for several other operating systems, including Unix, macOS, and Windows.

Vim configuration is portable, and you can have the same Vim experience by copying your configuration files from one machine to another.

Vim is lightweight and fast. Vim runs primarily on the terminal with a small footprint. Combined with a super-fast startup time and zero latency, you can use Vim anytime, anywhere, including over remote connections via SSH and low-powered hardware. You can even have multiple Vim sessions open at once without impacting your machine's performance. Vim provides a keyboard-only experience. You can do everything in Vim without taking your hands off the keyboard.

No context switching with the mouse improves your comfort and efficiency. It also allows a good experience when typing in restricted spaces such as when commuting on a train or bus. Vim provides simple and fast navigation commands. You can move your cursor with the arrow keys or "h", "j", "k", "l" to keep your hand on the home row like other text editors but, when you start using text objects, you increase your efficiency a lot.

You can also combine these with numbers to move faster. For example, "3w" moves to the beginning of the third word. Vim provides many of these navigation commands. In addition to navigation commands, Vim provides intuitive mnemonics actions. For example, press "i" to insert text, "c" to change , "d" to delete , and so on. The best part is you can combine these two ideas to create powerful command chains.

Vim structures these command chains semantically, reflecting our thought process, similar to sentences in English with verbs and objects. When you first start with Vim, these commands feel awkward but, with a little practice, they make text editing highly efficient. Vim is extremely flexible and powerful. You can start simple and use it to edit configuration files quickly. You can also write programs in your favorite programming language, with features like code completion, syntax highlighting, and syntax checking, similar to popular IDE's.

Vim provides out-of-the-box syntax highlighting for many languages and file types. Vim is fully customizable. You can provide options on the fly or through a config file. You can also create conditional configurations that are effective only when editing a particular type of file.

In addition to customization, Vim supports plugins out of the box. The open-source community has developed several plugins to extend Vim's functionality even further.

You can add code syntax for other languages, integrate with Git, add a fancy status bar, fuzzy finding, smart code commenting, code snippets, and many other features. More than just a text editor, Vim is a platform that allows you to build your own text editing experience according to your requirements and preferences. Vim is a fantastic text editor. It's fast, flexible, and powerful, but most of all, it's fun to use.

I honestly don't see me doing some of the things that I can do in Vim with any other editor, at least not as efficiently.