Vim — The Complete Guide: The Editor on Almost Every Server, for Fast Keyboard Work
Vim is a modal text editor: there is a command mode and an insert mode, and every action takes a few keystrokes. It is present on almost every Linux server and on macOS, so anyone who logs into a compute server or a Linux-based controller will almost always find it there. Windows also has a graphical interface, gVim.
Vim
Vim project (Bram Moolenaar, now maintained by Christian Brabandt and contributors)
The classic modal text editor installed on almost every Unix system — fast, light and suited to terminal and server work.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Keyboard editing — move, delete and copy with short commands you can combine.
- Recorded macros — repeat the same fix across hundreds of lines of an input file.
- Regex — advanced find and replace across the whole file.
- File comparison — show the differences between two versions of a file.
- Plugins and syntax highlighting — for many languages and config files.
Licence and learning
Vim is free for any use, including commercial, under a free licence compatible with the GPL. It is charityware: the developers ask for a donation to a charity for children in Uganda, but it is not required. To get started, run vimtutor — a lesson of about half an hour. Even three basic commands are enough to fix a file on a server.
Related tools
For a modern version with Lua and LSP — Neovim. For an editor you can extend without limits — GNU Emacs. For a simple graphical editor on Windows — Notepad++.
Neovim
Neovim project
A modern Vim with built-in Lua, LSP and Tree-sitter — a fast keyboard-driven editor that also works in a terminal and on remote servers.
Get it from the vendor
GNU Emacs
Free Software Foundation (GNU Project)
An almost endlessly extensible editor, with Org mode for notes and tasks, AUCTeX for LaTeX, Magit for Git and more.
Get it from the vendor
Notepad++
Don Ho
A light text and code editor for Windows — input files for analysis programs, data files and scripts.
Get it from the vendor
Geany
Geany team
A light, fast code editor — scripts, G-code, input files for analysis programs and config files, with syntax highlighting.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
Even if you do not use it daily, basic Vim skills save time every time you need to fix a file on a server.