Vim is a free and open-source modal text editor available for most major platforms. For non-programming questions, please use https://vi.stackexchange.com instead.
Vim is a free and open source modal text editor with a steep learning curve that leads to high efficiency in many tasks related to text editing. To get started with Vim, run the interactive vimtutor command and read :help user-manual in Vim itself.
Vim is a highly configurable and extensible text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX-like systems and is available on a large number of other systems including Win32, MS-DOS, OS X, AMIGA, OS/2, Cygwin and many more. Vim was originally written by Bram Moolenaar who lead its development for over 30 years. Since 2023, Christian Brabandt has been leading the Vim project.
Vim is often called a "programmer's editor," and is so useful for programming that many consider it to replace an IDE. It's not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files.
Before you ask
- Consider posting Vim related questions at Vi and Vim Stack Exchange, especially if the question concerns Vim usage or is not related to programming.
- Vim has an extensive help system that will often address your questions. Type
:help <subject>within Vim to search for help on a particular subject. Use:helpgrep <pattern>for full-text search. The help documentation is also available online. For a thorough introduction, read How do I navigate to topics in Vim's documentation? - Search Stack Overflow for similar or duplicate questions.
Free Vim books
- A Byte of Vim
- Vi Improved – Vim - Steve Oualline
- Learn Vimscript the Hard Way - Steve Losh
Vim books
- Pro Vim
- Practical Vim, Second Edition
- vi and Vim Editors Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition
- Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition
Documentation
- In Vim, type
:help user-manual. - Online user manual at vimhelp.org
Tutorial
See also
- The home page of Vim
- The Official Vim Tips Wiki
- Vi and Vim Stack Exchange
- Screencasts available on vimcasts.org.
- Collection of interactive Vim learning tools on openvim
- Vim quick reference card
- VIM Adventures: Learning Vim while playing a game
- Vim Awesome: Vim extensions classified into categories along with installation instructions
License/charityware
Vim is Charityware. You can use and copy it as much as you like, but you are encouraged to make a donation for needy children in Uganda. Please see kcc below or visit the ICCF web site, available at these URLs:
Related tags
- neovim - Neovim is a fork of Vim and quickly gaining in popularity. Please don't use vim on pure Neovim questions.
- macvim - a graphical Vim distribution that behaves more like a native Mac application.
- vi - the original
vieditor by Bill Joy. Most modern operating systems come with an aliasvithat actually runs (a minimal) Vim. - vimdiff - starting Vim in
diffmode to compare two or more files. - vim-syntax-highlighting - rules for syntax highlighting and colorization.
- vim-plugin - questions on Vim's plugin (eco) system.
There are also several dedicated tags for popular plugins.
