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What Vim Can Do

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. It's useful whether you're already using vi or using a different editor. Users of Vim 5 and 6 should consider upgrading to Vim 7. The main advantages of Vim 6 compared to Vim 5 can be found on this page.

A General Overview

Emaks-Vim-Notepad comic Copyright (c) 2007 Laurent Gregoire

What Is Vim?




What Vim Is Not?

Vim isn't an editor designed to hold its users' hands. It is a tool, the use of which must be learned.

Vim isn't a word processor. Although it can display text with various forms of highlighting and formatting, it isn't there to provide WYSIWYG editing of typeset documents. (It is great for editing TeX, though.)

Vim's License

Vim is charityware. Its license is GPL-compatible, so it's distributed freely, but we ask that if you find it useful you make a donation to help children in Uganda through the ICCF. The full license text can be found in the documentation. Much more information about charityware on Charityware.info.

Vim in Six Kilobytes

If all of this information is overwhelming, try a smaller dose. We can expound the wonders of vim in just six kilobytes -- and in more languages than you can shake a stick at!


Don't take our word for it! Read what others have said about Vim.

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