Dear reader,
What is vi? Or what is vIM? (Vi Improved)
Anybody will tell you it is a text editor. Then people will be quick to advice, ''please don't touch it with a ten foot barge pole''. You will become a lunatic and end up in a mental asylum.
Thanks to the vi editor, most people dread the word UNIX. First thing that comes to people's minds why they decided never to think of UNIX before sleeping is the dreadful vi.
Ouch! Such a brain damaged software? It is a lesson for all of us. When I open an editor to type something, why doesn't it work like Notepad? Why do I have to keep pressing the ESC key and why does the silly author of vi expect me to use the alphabets for operations that are best performed by the arrow keys, HOME, PGUP, PGDOWN keys etc..
If people have no choice after a week of tinkering, they get some time to relax and have some coffee. Still they can't forget how bad their week with vi was!
And while commenting to their room mate in the hostel, the room mate tells, '' So why don't you try emacs instead?''
But her hope is crushed the moment she gets pain in the fingers typing Control-C Control-X and Control-X Control-W all the time. Oh my God ! I have to decide between the devil and the deep sea!
Bill Joy , one of the founders of the Stanford University Network(SUN) is the author of vi. He is an eccentric engineer very brilliant and non conventional. He has invented other things like Java, but his most noteworthy contribution seems to be vi and few other early innovations in the UNIX and TCP/IP world.
Then, a Danish gentleman by name Bram Moolenaar after several years released a sexy software called Vim which stands for Vi Improved. But if you talk to him he will quickly point out several brain damaged design decisions of vi.
vi was user unfriendly and spooky but tremendously powerful, feature rich and stable. It had a certain magnetism to attract geeks as things worked like magic to an onlooker. This is true with emacs also but vi and emacs are different beasts and UNIX people discuss this politics after a bottle of wine.
Vim gave vi a totally different clothing , ported it to Windows and several architectures, changed the smell , look and feel of vi, gave it a graphical interface and tons and tons of new features, especially syntax highlighting and so on and so forth.
In doing so, Bram was smart enough to make sure that it still maintained the features of vim and the spirit of vi design. It is not exactly backward compatible but you can think of it as vi with extra ammunition.
For me , vi ( henceforth vi refers to vim) is much more than an editor. I type my mails in vi. I compile my programs from vi, I write my programs using vi, I write my articles in vi, I do source code navigation using ctags in vi, I do search and replace and so on.
With all the bad name that vi got with early users, I would argue that exactly the features that make it difficult for newbies make it powerful. Like linux. The more you use it the more you like it and start appreciating why it was designed like this and not any other way.
There are several features a command oriented editor like vi only can give. Several things have no parallel in any other editor. Without using the mouse you can do better than what the mouse is supposed to be doing. Very powerful editing operations can be performed with repetition commands, navigating to different places in the source code or document, capitalizing text, repeating text, indenting, rectangular cuts(familiar in the GUI editor world), being anywhere in the life and deleting it and so on.
There are also several plugins that support editing remote files using ftp inside vi. In fact this is best done using the command $ ssh -t <hostname> ''vi <filename>''.
Anyway your editing becomes very powerful and you save all the time you would have otherwise spent in using the mouse or GUI. In fact GUI cannot predict what all operations you need.
And syntax highlighting. I first heard of it after seeing the multiple colors in vi. Just type :sy on in vi and see. Your life suddenly becomes colorful. With new colors come joy. :-) And it is not mere eye candy.
Vi syntax highlighting understands every single text format on earth. You can easily delineate comments from code, edit configuration files, look for syntax mistakes, if a bracket mismatch is there, vi will clearly show you with it's coloring. In fact I have saved time instead of waiting till the compiler throws an error because vi's syntax highlighting detects it.
And of course it is a matter of habit. Once you acquire a habit. It is hard to change. Old habits die hard. I think my brain has got wired with vi keystrokes. So I don't think of a need to learn anything else unless there is a compelling reason for the same.
Want to check a manual page? Just type K under the word. Want to join lines? Type J. Want to read or write from or to parts of other files? :r <filename>, :w <filename> , :4,15w <filename> for lines between 4 and 15 and so on.
Copy paste is an essential part of software engineering. Vi helps out by specifying line numbers or else using the ''v'' command to select text. Instead of the mouse highlighting text, you do it with the keyboard.
One thing Windows programmers like is the auto completion features for keywords and arguments. This also avoids compiler errors. In vi you can do it by pressing Ctrl-P or Ctrl-N in insert mode. However this doesn't work very well without ctags.
It has got a truly vast command set. Take a look!
