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Vim Turns 20
quanticle writes "20 years ago today, Bram Moolenaar released vim to the public. From the article:'The Vim text editor was first released to the public on November 2, 1991—exactly 20 years ago today. Although it was originally designed as a vi clone for the Amiga, it was soon ported to other platforms and eventually grew to become the most popular vi-compatible text editor. It is still actively developed and widely used across several operating systems.' Share your vim stories and your tales of battles with emacs users."
emacs would make a great operating system, if only it had a text editor worth a shit
I like and use gvim all the time.
My main beef with it (solved by recompiling) is with fonts. I like the old fashioned font called "fixed". It derives from the ancient, non-scalable standard bitmapped font which came with X. It also happens to be very readable and to my eyes looks much sharper than the anti-aliased fonts. There are also excellent UTF-8 versions available too.
For some reason, this is almost impossible to get if one has gvim compiled as most distros do it (using gtk or gnome). Not only that but the fonts seem to change on the slightest whim of an update from the package manager.
The solution seems to be to recompile it with Athena or Motif support.
I must say, however that if Athena is the solution, then you really have problems :(
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I use vim, my wife uses emacs. We sleep in the same bed, unless she is swapping.
Vi was also released in 1976.
i[ENTER] Happy Birthday, vim!!! [ESC]:wq![ENTER]
I use it all the time, for editing, for development, for general work, for writing my todo list today. Hell, I sometimes catch myself trying to use VI commands in my web browser, or other GUI programs.
It's actually come to replace all my other stuff, from IDE's to graphical text editors. I'm really happy with it!
More like NANO, wtf?
In 1996, I developed Exuberant Ctags as a better ctags. Bram started including it in his Vim distributions and our programs were paired together in much the same was that Elvis was packaged with its own ctags clone, and Emacs was packaged with its own ctags. Eventually, Exuberant Ctags became large enough that it caused the Vim distribution to become too large to fit on a 5.25-inch floppy and Bram said it was time to let them grow separately. Exuberant Ctags, as well, got picked up by the Linux distributors as the resident ctags program.
I have always enjoyed working with Bram over the years and wish I could have met him. He is a very pleasant and easy person to work with, very accommodating, and very bright. I think very highly of him and I am glad to see his editor become one of the bulwarks of Linux distributions, as well as used on many other platforms.
Darren Hiebert
I use vim for programming, tweaking, both locally and remotely. Don't quite like its GUI, I prefer to use it on konsole, xterm or whatever terminal emulator is at hand, even though I use KDE. Nothing beats vim for programming, with its syntax highlighting, fast navigation within a file and among files, reindenting, searching and replacing, window splitting and many, many other features, all available in a couple or two of keystrokes. I consider myself a long time vim user, but I know I've barely skimmed over the surface of its ocean of features. I'm very grateful to Bram Moolenaar and the hordes of brave but anonymous vim contributors.
Hope vim lives on at least another twenty years.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
Ditto.
For a web browser look into vimperator.
Yup. Column editing is the killer app that vi never had.
Don't forget undo trees. It's a feature I use maybe once every few months, but those times I'm REALLY glad I had it.
If you don't already know, it fixes the problem where you undo some changes, make a new change, then can't redo the changes you undid. In vim, you can go back in time to retrieve the previous state. It's like having micro version control for every edit.
SJW n. One who posts facts.