Vim logo

Vim

Highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing
26.8K
21.7K
+ 1
2.4K

What is Vim?

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.
Vim is a tool in the Text Editor category of a tech stack.

Who uses Vim?

Companies
1561 companies reportedly use Vim in their tech stacks, including CRED, Tech Stack, and Lyft.

Developers
24906 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Vim.

Vim Integrations

.NET Core, TSLint, Pylint, CodeMirror, and Apache FreeMarker are some of the popular tools that integrate with Vim. Here's a list of all 35 tools that integrate with Vim.
Pros of Vim
347
Comes by default in most unix systems (remote editing)
328
Fast
312
Highly configurable
297
Less mouse dependence
247
Lightweight
145
Speed
100
Plugins
97
Hardcore
82
It's for pros
65
Vertically split windows
30
Open-source
25
Modal editing
22
No remembering shortcuts, instead "talks" to the editor
21
It stood the Test of Time
16
Unicode
13
VimPlugins
13
Everything is on the keyboard
13
Stick with terminal
12
Dotfiles
11
Flexible Indenting
10
Hands stay on the keyboard
10
Efficient and powerful
10
Programmable
9
Everywhere
9
Large number of Shortcuts
8
A chainsaw for text editing
8
Unmatched productivity
7
Developer speed
7
Super fast
7
Makes you a true bearded developer
7
Because its not Emacs
7
Modal editing changes everything
6
You cannot exit
6
Themes
5
EasyMotion
5
Most and most powerful plugins of any editor
5
Shell escapes and shell imports :!<command> and !!cmd
5
Intergrated into most editors
5
Shortcuts
5
Great on large text files
5
Habit
5
Plugin manager options. Vim-plug, Pathogen, etc
4
Intuitive, once mastered
4
Perfect command line editor
1
Not MicroSoft
Decisions about Vim

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Vim in their tech stack.

Denys
Software engineer at Typeform · | 13 upvotes · 1.7M views
Shared insights
at
  • Go because it's easy and simple, facilitates collaboration , and also it's fast, scalable, powerful.
  • Visual Studio Code because it has one of the most sophisticated Go language support plugins.
  • Vim because it's Vim
  • Git because it's Git
  • Docker and Docker Compose because it's quick and easy to have reproducible builds/tests with them
  • Arch Linux because Docker for Mac/Win is a disaster for the human nervous system, and Arch is the coolest Linux distro so far
  • Stack Overflow because of Copy-Paste Driven Development
  • JavaScript and Python when a something needs to be coded for yesterday
  • PhpStorm because it saves me like 300 "Ctrl+F" key strokes a minute
  • cURL because terminal all the way
See more

Blog Posts

Vim's Features

  • Vertically Split Windows
  • Vimdiff
  • Folding
  • Plugins
  • Flexible Indenting
  • Unicode

Vim Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Vim?
Emacs
GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.
Neovim
Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.
Atom
At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.
Notepad++
Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.
Sublime Text
Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.
See all alternatives

Vim's Followers
21740 developers follow Vim to keep up with related blogs and decisions.