Vim: The Text Editor For Geeks

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Many of us just love to work with Vim , a simplified text editor with Mouse and GUI is rarely something we use.Being a touch typist we don’t want to move our hands from their position on the keyboard.In simple words,there’s command to everything,from moving the cursor to save and exit.


But wait, should I start using Vim just because I’m too lazy to move my hands around mouse?

Let me complete,

Vim can be used remotely. We can use Vim everywhere and can be run over an SSH connection and it works just well. So if you need to do remote work you only need to learn one tool so why not Vim?


What’s Vim?

I’m not good with the definitions so lets just copy it from Wikipedia ,

“ Vim (a contraction of Vi IMproved) is a clone of Bill Joy's vi text editor program for Unix. It was written by Bram Moolenaar based on source for a port of the Stevie editor to the Amiga and first released publicly in 1991. Vim is designed for use both from a command-line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface. Vim is free and open source software and is released under a license that includes some charityware clauses, encouraging users who enjoy the software to consider donating to children in Uganda.The license is compatible with the GNU General Public License.

Although Vim was originally released for the Amiga, Vim has since been developed to be cross-platform, supporting many other platforms. In 2006, it was voted the most popular editor amongst Linux Journal readers; in 2015 the Stack Overflow developer survey found it to be the third most popular text editor; and in 2016 the Stack Overflow developer survey found it to be the fourth most popular development environment.”

Some Basic Tutorial :-

1) Starting Vim :

Open terminal window and type ‘vim’ without ‘’.Somthing like this will appear:




2) Lets get started by creating a simple java Hello, World! program(please don’t judge me I want it to keep simple)



step 1.


open terminal and type “vi filename.java” without “”,somthing like this :



step 2.



Now its the time to command vim that I want to ‘insert’(type) something

So for this , I’ll hit the ‘i’ button to be in the Insert mode ,Now I can type anything .So ,I typed this simple program.
 


step 3.



By Hitting ‘Esc’ button ,I’ll enter in the command mode,So if I want to command something in between like save the file or copy a block of text or anything, I can type there.


Now I want to save and exit,so for this ,I’ll hit the ‘Esc’ button and will type ‘:wq’ in the command mode and hit Enter key . Something like this :

 



 
for just saving the file,type ‘:w’ without ‘’ in the command mode,for just quitting,type ‘:q’ .If you’ll try to quit without saving ,You’ll get the warning too.


Vim is also available for Windows.


The Best part is Vim helps to raise fund for the poor children in Uganda.

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