What is the proper way to capitalize 'vim'? I have seen these variants being used:

  • vim
  • Vim
  • ViM
  • VIM

Which is the correct one? Or are they all considered correct? If I look at the :help files, I see several styles being used.

  • 1
    I'm voting to close this as off-topic because it isn't really about Vim so much as about the English language. It might be on-topic on English Language & Usage, but I would read their help center / ask on chat first. – Doorknob Feb 7 '15 at 2:14
  • 9
    @Doorknob The spelling of application names is often irregular, and doesn't follow 'normal' English gammer rules on the subject. The correct answer is usually 'whatever the author says is correct', see for example LaTeX, GnuPG, iOS, JavaScript, etc. – Martin Tournoij Feb 7 '15 at 2:25
  • The answer is too easy to find in the doc for that question to be of any use. – romainl Feb 7 '15 at 10:22
  • 3
    @romainl I didn't time it, but I think it took me 20 to 30 minutes to find this answer ... Not the most difficult, but not very easy either. You need to know where to look :-) ... – Martin Tournoij Feb 7 '15 at 14:01

This actually took quite some searching, but the correct way is 'Vim'. From :help pronounce:


Some parts of the Vim documentation does the all-caps 'VIM' though, this seems to be older documentation.
I could not find any references 'ViM' in the documentation, except for a single obvious typo.

I'm not sure about the spelling of Gvim; it's spelled as 'gvim', 'Gvim', 'GVim', and 'gVim' at various places in the documentation; but 'gvim '(no capitals) is the most common by far (560, 57, 5, and 8). I suspect because gvim is just a name of a commandline tool (as a convenient alias of vim -g) rather than a proper name in it's own right.

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  • 6
    vim.org spells it as gVim right in the front page in article. – muru Feb 11 '15 at 20:54

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