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Vim, which stands for Vi IMproved, is a free multi-platform text editor. Vim's multi-mode full screen editing paradigm is a conceptual outgrowth of the original vi editor that, since the early 1980s, has been distributed as an essential part of every operating system derived from Unix. Since its inception in the early 1990s, Vim has grown to accommodate an extensive array of features, both original and derived from other free and commercial text editors. This success is an outgrowth of the development process which has been driven by the open-source publication of the Vim code, combined with the constant interaction among users, developers, and the original creator of Vim, Bram Moolenaar.
Some of the main features of Vim and improvements of Vim over vi:
- Vim is 99% vi compatible
- portability: there are versions for
- multi level undo/redo
- multiple modified buffers
- Graphical User Interface (GUI) mode
- split windows -- both horizontal and vertical
- syntax highlighting for hundreds of file types, even Wikipedia format
- support for Unicode
- trans-session history of commands/searches/registers/positions ...
- command-line editing and extensive completion
- IDE-like build/review/edit features
- session state preservation, including cursor position and history
- configurable status line
- insert-mode completion
- multi-mode text folding
- extended scripting and expressions
- scripted plugins
- remote file editing from ssh, ftp and http servers, among others
- visual mode selection with char/line/block ranges
- comprehensive integrated help system with hypertext via ctags
- code folding
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