| Sven Guckes@vim.org ©1995-2001 | Last update: Thu Mar 01 18:00:00 MET 2001 |
pages 140 - 146: "That's Vimprovement! A Better vi" (Be a better editor - try Vim) by Steve Oualline. Steve manages to explain the main Vim features in five pages, with pictures and examples. From using undo/redo and multiple windows, via syntax highlighting and :make, to recording and executing a macro.
Text Editing
Winner: Emacs
Runner-up: Vim
Vim: What Vim lacks in features (as compared to the feature-heavy Emacs), it makes up easily in speed and simplicity. Vim is the ideal editor for the kinds of quick jobs one must always do under Linux, such as the editing of text-based configuration files or shell scripts. In this case, we chose not to go to the extreme of simplicity, but to balance speed and simplicity with power. Vim seems to find the best balance of the editors we tried, and gets an extra boost because it is an extension of vi, the simple editor that most Unix users seem to know -- if not sooner, then later.
KDE developer and evangelist Kurt Granroth has a different idea. When I asked him about his preferred development environment he said "I use vim (not just vi -- only vim will do) with egcs and gdb."
Slashdot's Rob Malda (aka CmdrTaco) takes us through the technical changes his popular Web site has undergone in the last year and a half...
"...but as Slashdot's popularity grew, the response became more and more sluggish. During peak hours, the machine's load level would climb to 10.0 (A load of 1.0 refers to one fully busy CPU; 0.50 to 1.50 is normal) or even higher. Even at that point, telnet sessions running pine and vim remained usable. I was quite impressed. .."
Vim is probably the most featureful of the VI-style editors. Judging by newsgroup postings, it may be the most popular as well. With the release of vim-5.0s, vim 5 has finally reached a beta rather than alpha state. This revision has a really well-implemented syntax-highlighting system for many programming and shell-script languages, and it's not too difficult to adapt to new file-types and languages. The down-side is that vim is growing larger, and is beginning to lose the quickness and low memory-usage that has been a hallmark of VI-style editors. [...]
"There are other text editors you can investigate, but they are not for the faint of heart, as they are known for their arcane and hard to remember commands. Among these are vi, vim,elvis and their clones. If you intend to make a career out of being a Linux or UNIX sysadmin, I recommend at least having a passing familiarity with vi, as it is installed by default on every version of UNIX, even in its most pared-down state."
You must edit a file to do this. The text editors that come with Linux are very good, but will take a fair amount of explaining. For now I recommend the vi (or vim) editor.
URL: http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/vim/press/ URL: http://www.vim.org/press/ (mirror) Created: Tue Jun 09 00:00:00 CEST 1998Send feedback on this page to