Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. It's useful whether you're already using vi or using a different editor.

Vim is an almost compatible version of the UNIX editor Vi. Many new features have been added: multi-level undo, syntax highlighting, command line history, on-line help, spell checking, filename completion, block operations, etc.
There is also a Graphical User Interface (GUI) available. See "runtime/doc/vi_diff.txt" for differences with Vi.

This editor is very useful for editing programs and other plain ASCII files. All commands are given with normal keyboard characters, so those who can type with ten fingers can work very fast. Additionally, function keys can be defined by the user, and the mouse can be used.

Vim currently runs under Amiga DOS, MS-DOS, MS-Windows (95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7), Atari MiNT, Macintosh, BeOS, VMS, RISC OS, OS/2 and almost all flavours of UNIX. Porting to other systems should not be very difficult.

What Is Vim?
Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems.

Vim is often called a "programmer's editor," and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It's not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files.

Despite what the above comic suggests, Vim can be configured to work in a very simple (Notepad-like) way, called evim or Easy Vim.

What Vim Is Not?
Vim isn't an editor designed to hold its users' hands. It is a tool, the use of which must be learned.

Vim isn't a word processor. Although it can display text with various forms of highlighting and formatting, it isn't there to provide WYSIWYG editing of typeset documents. (It is outstanding for editing TeX, though.)

Vim's License
Vim is charityware. Its license is GPL-compatible, so it's distributed freely, but we ask that if you find it useful you make a donation to help children in Uganda through the ICCF. The full license text can be found in the documentation. More information about charityware on Charity-ware.org.

Vim in Six Kilobytes
If all of this information is overwhelming, try a smaller dose. We can expound the wonders of vim in just six kilobytes -- and in more languages than you can shake a stick at!

Testimonials
Don't take our word for it! Read what others have said about Vim.

The license of this software is Freeware, you can free download and free use this text editor software.