What Is Vim

Before providing my own views on what Vim is, let's take a look at what the official documentation has to say:

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. - http://www.vim.org

The highlights of this sentence that you should remember are text editor and highly efficient text editing.

If you'd like to know more about the history of Vim, you can check out the following article.

The short version

The short version is useful for describing Vim to family and friends who aren't really interested in anything other than understanding your conversation.

Vim is a text editor.

The medium version

The medium version is useful to peak someone's interest just enough to make them consider learning more about it.

Vim is a text editor that is geared towards highly efficient text editing. The goal is that you can edit a document without ever using your mouse or taking your hands of of your keyboard.

The long version

The long version describes the real reason that user's get obsessed with Vim.

Vim is much more than just a text editor. It's true that it started off as a stand alone text editor, but it has grown into so much more. It has essentially become a universally accepted set of hotkeys that allow string manipulation and movement through any type of text based document. These hotkeys allow for extremely efficient text editing. The goal is that you can edit a document without ever using your mouse or taking your hands of of your keyboard.

The Vim hotkeys, which are typically called 'keybindings' have been integrated into almost every major text editor and IDE either natively, or through a plugin. This allows you to use the amazing features that come along with IDEs while maintaining the efficient text editing that comes along with the Vim hotkeys.

Why I love and use Vim

To understand why use Vim every chance I get, check out my article Why I Use Vim.