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Vim

Score9.5 out of 10

30 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Vim?

Vim is an open source configurable text editor.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Vim.
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Vim is Simply Fantastic!

Incentivized
Don BurksView profile
Director of Engineering in Information Technology at Bulletproof Studio Tools (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Vim is the primary code editor used for all of our backend development. While VSCode is used on the front end, the developers for the backend prefer the speed and power of vim. It solves all of our use cases.

Pros

  • Syntax highlighting
  • Working in every environment
  • Easy navigation

Cons

  • Being able to jump to function and symbol definitions in all languages
  • Better file management
  • Easier undo config

Return on Investment

  • Vim is free
  • Vim is ridiculously powerful
  • Vim is fast

Despite the big learning curve, Vim is the best text editor.

Incentivized
Jake TolbertView profile
Director of Development - Data Services at Millikin University (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • Editing text with esoteric, but powerful keybindings.
  • Regular expression-based search/replace.
  • Function writing, ie. macros is simple and easy.

Cons

  • Vim is hard to learn--the keybindings aren't intuitive.
  • Regular expression support is idiosyncratic.

Return on Investment

  • I use Vim multiple times a day every day. Without it, I'd be significantly slower at my job.
  • Because it's free and open source, the only downside to Vim is the lost productivity you'll have in learning it, a loss that you'll make up for in efficiency pretty quickly later on.

Alternatives Considered

Notepad++ and GNU Emacs

Other Software Used

RStudio, QlikView, Chrome DevTools

Vim: Good for quick edits, not great for other things.

Incentivized
Greg GarnhartView profile
Research & Development: Product Intern in Product Management at Bandwidth Inc. (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • Convenience! Vim is built into the Mac terminal, so that's nice.
  • Quick Edits! Vim takes virtually no time to boot up, so if you only need to edit a line or two, it's a great way to do that.
  • Looking cool(ish). Vim makes you look like you know what you're doing. Wow!

Cons

  • Vim isn't great for huge programs, at least in my own experience. There is no autocomplete, no GUI debugger, etc.
  • Vim's learning curve is certainly an issue.

Return on Investment

  • Vim has probably saved some people some time. It did not cost anyone money, though, so the ROI is positive.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Visual Studio Code and Sublime Text

Other Software Used

Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Trello, GitHub

Lighting fast editor with a steep learning curve

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

VIM is used as an editor all over the whole organization, mostly used as a convenient editor in remote Linux servers. Usually, a full development environment does not exist in those servers. Vim, which is bundled in most of the Linux distributions, comes as a handy tool in those environments. Some people, including me, use it as the main editor, even the main development environment.

Pros

  • Lightweight
  • Bundled in most Linux distributions.
  • Very efficient once you get familiar with it.

Cons

  • Steep learning curve.

Return on Investment

  • Steep learning curve means lower than average efficiency at the beginning.
  • After getting familiar, it is so efficient that you will never want to use other editors.
  • Good return on investment for serious editor/developers, may not be good for casual ones.

Alternatives Considered

Notepad++

Other Software Used

Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Postman, Trello

The only text editor you'll ever need!

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • Vim is incredibly light-weight with little to no dependencies and is almost guaranteed to exist on any GNU/Linux server that you have. You won't have to worry about managing package dependencies to get it on any system that currently doesn't have it. It won't ever hog resources or be the bottleneck in your coding/editing process.
  • Vim is highly configurable. I would say extensible, but really, it's the configuration and plugin capability that I want to highlight. It can function and look like anything you want - that's why it's so popular even with coders who want to optimize it for everything from C/C++ coding to Python coding. Syntax highlighting, code linting etc are all supported. But for just text editing and viewing, you can make it look exactly like you want - and then because of its highly portable nature, if you use Vim on another system, you can just grab the configuration file and voila! you've got it looking exactly like you had set up in seconds!
  • Vim promotes productivity. Really, this is a no-brainer. with all it's shortcuts, and ability to map keys to functions, it really makes viewing, editing, selecting, tweaking, text files highly efficient.
  • It has some esoteric functions that are really useful. So this point is something that I find is underrated. Often times, when transferring files between different Operating Systems, or even moving files using different protocols (saying you're using SFTP to get a file from one spot to another, or then you're storing it on NFS and then moving it locally, etc), you'll get weird issues with the file that may not show up unless you can spot the glyphs visually - that's where Vim comes in. It has the ability to show the corrupted portions of a file in a visual way so you can easily see which portions of the file are messed up

Cons

  • Although all of this review thus far has been focused on the Linux version, there is a Windows version of Vim. And it's kind of weird. It isn't broken per se, but it certainly doesn't have the same look and feel of the Linux version. Of course, I'm not referring to the fact that it has a GUI, but it isn't really optimized. And that's a shame because users who are trying to get into Vim, but happen to use Windows tend to get a negative impression
  • The built-in documentation of Vim sometimes tends to assume you already know how to use it, and its jargon can be off-putting for newcomers. There is a plethora of amazing how-to's out there online, which is fantastic, but the in-line help function is limited, which means you'll be learning Vim, outside of Vim.

Return on Investment

  • The enhanced productivity that using Vim results in is fantastic. There is no need to roll out any text editor on the myriad of servers of we in order for config files to be read/written. Moreover, by standardizing on Vim, we know that everybody will know exactly how to access the text files
  • There are no security loopholes to using Vim that I know of. So having a tool that won't result in your system being exploited is a huge ROI in today's environment

Other Software Used

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), VMware ESXi