An explanation in six kilobytes.
Vim ("Vi IMproved") is a "vi clone", ie
a program similar to the text editor "vi".
Vim works in textmode in every terminal,
but it also has a graphic user interface,
ie menus and support for the mouse.
Vim is available for many platforms and has many added features
compared to Vi. (see http://www.vim.org/viusers.php)
Vim is compatible to almost all Vi commands - except Vi's bugs. ;-)
Vim is available for many systems: AmigaOS, Atari MiNT, BeOS, DOS,
MacOS, NextStep, OS/2, OSF, RiscOS, SGI, UNIX, VMS, Win16 + Win32
(Windows95/98/00/NT) - and especially FreeBSD and Linux. :-)
The copyright is in the hands of the main author
Vim is "charity-ware", ie you are encouraged to make
a donation to orphans in Uganda (see ":help uganda").
Vim is OpenSource and everybody is welcome to help improve it!
Beginner's Editor - User Friendly:
Vim is much easier for beginners than Vi because of extensive Online Help,
"undo" and "redo" commands (never mind mistakes - just use undo+redo!),
support for the mouse and configurable icons and menus (GUI).
Character codes and Terminals:
Vim has support for the iso-latin1 character set and for termcap.
(Vanilla Vi has problems with this.)
Characters and Languages:
Vim supports for right-to-left editing (eg with Arabian, Farsi, Hebrew),
and multi-byte texts, ie languages with graphical characters represented
by more than one "byte", such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean (Hangul),
(Technically speaking, Vim supports text in UTF-8 and Unicode.)
Text Formatting and Visual Mode:
With Vim you can select text "visually" (with highlighting) before you
"operate" on it, eg copy, delete, substitute, shift left or right,
change case of letters or format the text incl preserving indented text.
Vim allows selection and operations on rectangular text blocks, too.
Vim has commands which complete your input -
either with commands, filenames, and words.
Vim also has "autocommands" for automatic execution of commands
(eg automatic uncompression of compressed files).
Vim allows you to enter special characters by a combination
of two characters (eg the combination of " and a yields an ä) -
and allows you to define other combinations, too.
Fileformat detection and conversion:
Vim automatically recognizes the type of files (DOS, Mac, Unix)
and also lets you save them in any other format -
no need for unix2dos on Windows any more!
Vim has a "history" for commands and searches, so you can
recall previous commands or search pattern to edit them.
Vim allows to "record" your editing for replaying for repetitive tasks.
Vim has much higher memory limits for line length
and buffer sizes than vanilla Vi.
Multiple Buffers and Split Screen:
Vim allows editing of multiple buffers and you can split the
screen into many subwindows (both horizontally and vertically),
so you can see many files or many parts of some files.
Number Prefix to commands:
Vim allows a number prefix for more
commands than with Vi (eg for "put").
Runtime Files (Helpfiles and Syntax Files):
[Additional files which are used when the program runs -
but these not contain code which has to be compiled and linked.]
Vim-5.7 comes with 70 help files (about 2080K of text) on
commands, options, with tips on configuration and editing.
(Vim-6.0x [010311]: 85 files, ca 2796K of text). Some files are
specific to the use of Vim on each operating system. [010311]
Vim has a built-in scripting language for easy extension.
Vim allows offsets for search commands, so you
place the cursor *after* the found text.
Vim allows to store information of an editing session into a file ("viminfo")
which allows them for being used with the next editing session, eg
buffer list, file marks, registers, command and search history.
Vim can expand tabs within the text with spaces (expandtab, :retab).
Vim offers to find text in files by using an index with "tags"
together with many tag stack commands.
Vim knows more text objects (paragraphs, sentences, words and WORDS -
all with and without surrounding whitespace) and allows to configure
the definition for these objects.
Vim shows text in color - according to its "(programming) language".
You can define the "language" ("syntax") of the files yourself.
Vim comes with 200+ syntax files for colorizing text in
common programming languages (Ada, C, C++, Eiffel, Fortran,
Haskell, Java, Lisp, Modula, Pascal, Prolog, Python,
Scheme, Smalltalk, SQL, Verilog, VisualBasic),
math programs (Maple, Matlab, Mathematica, SAS), markup text
(DocBook, HTML, LaTeX, PostScript, SGML-LinuxDoc, TeX, WML, XML),
program output (diff, man), setup files of programs (4DOS, Apache,
autoconfig, BibTeX, CSS, CVS, elm, IDL, LILO, pine, procmail, samba, slrn),
shell scripts and setups (shells: sh, bash, csh, ksh, zsh),
script languages (awk, Perl, sed, yacc)
system files (printcap, .Xdefaults) and
of course for Vim and its helptexts.
Vim has optional integration with Perl, Tcl and Python.
Vim can act as an OLE automation server under Windows.
Vim can also be installed with code for X-windows,
adding configurable menus and support for the mouse.
Vim's HomePage in the WWW:
For a more elaborate description
of Vim's features see the page
http://www.vim.org/about.php
=== Author and Translator
Last update: Mon Mar 12 07:00:00 MET 2001
Translated-by: Your Name <address>
