Vim

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Vim is one of the two major editors of the UNIX world. The other one is Emacs, which I am also quite fond of. Still, it’s hard to beat Vim. It may be awkward, ugly, and hard to use, but there’s just something inescapable about it. Regular expressions are a major part of the editing interface, which gives you a great deal of (admittedly cryptic) power.

Emacs and Vim get equal time in my work. I probably shouldn’t admit that in a public forum, since a statement like that is nearly considered blasphemous by devotees of each application. Emacs has a lot of power as an environment, but I still find Vim to be the more powerful editor. So which one I’ll use depends on the scope of my work that day. It will be Emacs if I need to do remote editing, email checking, project management, and other such tasks which are not specifically editing. However, the choice will be Vim if I just want to sit down and bang some code out in quick order with minimal distractions. Make your own choice, and have fun with it. And remember, you can use viper-mode if all you’re looking for is vi-style finger movement.

Ages ago, I had my own copy of the online Vim documentation on the site. It was a simple affair, and was intended to provide some filler for the site. Show I could do text formatting, stuff like that. The problem is that it takes up so much space on my Web host. You’re probably best off using the official documentation at the VimDoc site.

Cream

I recently discovered Cream, a heavily customized release of Vim intended to provide all the power of Vim without the headache of learning about Command Mode or anything like that. Try Cream if you are interested in getting an easy-to-use version of one incredibly powerful editor.