AVImark vs. Vim

AVImark works for us. Yes, there are times when we wish it could do this or do that, but overall, it does exactly what we need it to. It is easy to use and easy to teach to people with no knowledge of any vet software and it is pretty user-friendly as well.

I would recommend Vim in any scenario where text files have to be viewed, created, or edited on GNU/Linux computers. Regardless if you need to quickly change a few things in a configuration file, or you need to write up a full document, Vim is great. I wouldn't use Vim to view, edit, or create anything that requires "rich-text". In other words, if you need to format the text (bolding, font colours, word-art, etc), then Vim isn't the tool to use.

• Charting and chart interface are relatively user friendly
• Information searches are thorough and effective
• Scheduling calendar is easy to use and differentiate between types of appointments and doctors

• The efficient modal editing makes it very fast to write/edit code as I think of it.
• The customization and wide range of plugins let me do very specific things and automate parts of my workflow.
• The fact that it runs inside a terminal simplifies my window management and just becomes another Tmux window in my workflow.

• Emails don't always send.
• Sometimes can load very slowly.
• Inventory over multi sites is never right.

• Without a doubt the hardest program to learn. It is a completely different paradigm of thinking compared to other editors
• By default it doesn't have lots of fancy features you would find in larger IDE programs like code completion and linking
• It lives in the command line so a user has to be comfortable with this interface

I find the program to be very user-friendly. This is software that is easy to use and understand. There are a number of shortcut keys that make it even easier to use. When teaching AVImark to new employees with zero veterinary experience, they pick up how to use AVImark quickly.

I don't consider the steep learning curve to be a hinderance on the overall usability. I would rate this a ten, but to be honest a lot of people do get hung up at the beginning and just abandon it. However, for people who have made the moderate effort to get over the hump, nothing can be more usable.

There is no commercial support for Vim. Thus, it will not get a mark beyond 5. However, community support is very good. You can easily find solutions for most of the problems in the community.

AVImark is not a monthly subscription, so costs are overall cheaper. Also, exit barriers are high for this type of product. It would be difficult to retrain an entire hospital on a new system and work through the transition period.

Vim's keybindings are a lot more complex than Notepad++. With that, comes a whole bunch of capability that Notepad++ just can't match. Emacs is comparable, in terms of capabilities--because Vim is built into so many unix systems, I chose to learn it instead of Emacs. Knowing both probably isn't a bad idea, but there's enough to learn in either camp to keep you busy

• We moved to a different credit card company and are saving $40K dollars in fees from what World Pay was charging us

• It always increases productivity.
• Sometimes feature discovery is not easy. It could be documented well like how to install a plugin and if it supported well or not.