Differences between version 16 and predecessor to the previous major change of Vim.
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| Newer page: | version 16 | Last edited on Saturday, March 19, 2005 6:44:24 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
| Older page: | version 13 | Last edited on Wednesday, March 16, 2005 12:57:01 pm | by JohnMcPherson | Revert |
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
[Vim] is an evolution of vi(1).
-__vi__ stands for __V
__isual __E__ditor
. Vim is __V__i __Im__proved :)
+__vi__ stands for __Vi
__sual Editor
. Vim is __V__i __Im__proved :)
vi(1) is a text editor that comes with the original Unix system as well as pretty much every other flavour, variation or clone of it known to mankind. They're all the same, except for when they're different (see below). vi(1) is rather unique among text editors because it explicitly operates in "modes", of which it knows three:
__Normal__::
@@ -18,9 +18,9 @@
[Think of a mode as a martial arts stance; you can only do certain moves from each stance.|http://fallenearth.org/blogs/caiuschen/archives/2005/02/15/foot_pedals_in_vi_vs_emacs/]
Another thing to remember is that as opposed to [Emacs], even the bog standard vi(1) offers a huge pile of useful bindings out of the box. You don't ''need'' to synchronize DotFile~s across machines or spend a lot of time setting things up to achive an environment close to what your very own configuration feels like, even if you may still want to in order to do an extended amount of work. You can immediately work productively on any random machine a vi(1) is installed on (which means everywhere).
-Since vi(1) isn't free and limited in various annoying ways, Bram Moolenar created [Vim], which adheres to the interface and usage philosophy of its ancestor but has many more features.
+Since vi(1) isn't free and limited in various annoying ways, Bram Moolenar created [Vim], which adheres to the interface and usage philosophy of its ancestor but has many more features. It also has a [GUI] version called __gvim__ which is a thin [GUI] shell around [Vim] offering menus, a toolbar and popup dialogs
.
A notable addition in [Vim] is arrow key navigation (rather than having to use the <tt>~[h] ~[j] ~[k] ~[l]</tt> keys as in original vi(1)) - even in insert mode, where you traditionally can't navigate at all (except using backspace, if you are inclined to call that "navigation"). Some other vi(1) clones that allow arrow key navigation stick closer to the original by interpreting arrow keys in insert mode as a request to change to normal mode or even to insert the control codes into the file you're editing.
There's support for a huge number of neat features, like on-the-fly [gzip] and bzip2 de/compression and [SCP]/[FTP] up/download.
