Vim is the most famous text editor many programmers use for coding on the Linux terminal.
Vim is a text editor for Linux. Many people have grown up using Vim, that and its ubiquitous nature means it can be found on any Unix/Linux system.
Many “power users” swear by the power and functionality of Vim, however many people see it as intimidating and complicated. If you are new to vim, I recommend these exercises
Installation
Vim can be downloaded and installed from a software repository. Vim is often installed by default on Linux systems and even on Mac OS X.
You can install vim with your package manager
sudo apt-get install vim
Why vim?
The reasons for this are simple: it's fast, it's powerful, and it comes in both a terminal emulator and a GUI version.
You can use it locally or over an ssh connection. It can even be used inside IDEs as a plugin.
Vim allows programmers to edit text quickly and efficiently. You can jump to the end of file using G
, top of file using gg
and to line 10 using 10G
. Vim allows you to record and replay keystrokes and has many many more features.
Vim 8 comes with built-in support for Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby and Tcl programming languages.
Vim as a code editor but it's much more powerful than you may think. Before you do anything else, you should know that:
- Vim is not a text editor that uses a mouse. It's a program that uses keyboard shortcuts to perform all of the tasks.
- Vim is hard to learn. You will have to spend a lot of time practising and mastering your skills before using it effectively.
Top comments (1)
In the Linux/BSD community, vi/vim is more famous because it's a few decades old and can be used in the terminal. Google searches yield:
"vi linux" : 178.000.000 results
"vscode linux" : 25.900.000 results