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Vim (text editor) - Wikipedia

Vim (text editor)

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Vim (/vɪm/;1 short for v i im proved) is a free and open-source text editor. Vim provides both a terminal screen user interface as well as a graphical user interface (called gvim).

Vim’s documentation describes it as an improved form of the older vi text editor (though it is built from a distinct codebase). In release information, the author originally implied that Vim was an abbreviation for “Vi IMitation”, but later, the expansion was changed to “Vi IMproved” because, as described by the author, the functionality had increased beyond that of a clone of vi. Some sources indicate the change happened with v2.0, but conflicting information (including from author) suggests the change happened as early as v2.0 and as late as v3.0.2

Since its original release for the Amiga, Vim has been ported to many environments including Atari MiNT, BeOS, MS-DOS, Windows starting from Windows NT 3.1, OS/2, OS/390, MorphOS, OpenVMS, QNX, RISC OS, Linux, BSD, and Classic Mac OS.3 Vim is also shipped with Apple macOS.4 Independent ports of Vim are available for Android56 and iOS.7

Vim has been and continues to be popular for software development. In 2018, it was voted the most popular editor amongst Linux Journal readers.8 In 2015, the Stack Overflow developer survey found it to be the third most popular text editor,9 and, in 2019, the fifth most popular development environment.10

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. Vim documentation: intro Archived 13 January 2019 at the Wayback Machine: “Vim is pronounced as one word, like Jim, not vi-ai-em. It’s written with a capital, since it’s a name, again like Jim.” ↩

  2. “VILE (Vi Like Emacs) – Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)”. Archived from the original on 31 August 2019. Retrieved 7 September 2019. ↩

  3. “:help sys-file-list”
    “Vim Online: Downloads”. Archived from the original on 8 January 2007. Retrieved 7 January 2007. ↩

  4. “Mac OS X Manual Page For vim(1)”. developer.apple.com. Apple Inc. Archived from the original on 9 June 2012. Retrieved 12 January 2010. ↩

  5. “VimTouch, the development has stalled on this app”. GitHub. Archived from the original on 29 December 2015. Retrieved 9 August 2015. ↩

  6. “DroidVim, under active development”. GitHub. Archived from the original on 27 June 2018. Retrieved 5 March 2017. ↩

  7. “Vim – Applidium, mobile agency in Paris”. Archived from the original on 20 January 2012. Retrieved 11 August 2015. ↩

  8. “Best Editor | Linux Journal”. www.linuxjournal.com. Retrieved 20 April 2023. ↩

  9. “Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2015 § IV. Text Editor”. Stack Overflow. Archived from the original on 4 May 2019. Retrieved 25 July 2016. ↩

  10. “Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019 Results”. Stack Overflow § VII. Development Environments. Archived from the original on 7 March 2020. Retrieved 20 July 2019. ↩

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