Vim - The best editor in the world

As a developer I use an editor every single day and it is of severe importance that it fits my needs.
Throughout time I have tested many, many different editors but every time I keep returning to the Vim editor.
This simple (by looks) editor is often misunderstood as being difficult to use, lack many featues and being only used by the most geeky computer nerds.
This is not true at all. Out of the box, this editor is feature packed and most of my daily tasks would actually be covered by that. Luckily Vim is also highly extendable and the rest of my needs are covered by Vim scripts.

In 2006 I decided to give something back to the Vim project and started writing a book about the editor. It was a lot of hard work and I realized that even after using Vim for 10years, I had barely used the features of the editor.
My book was released in May 2007 and is now available worldwide as both a paper-book and as an eBook. Every time you buy this book, the publisher will give a portion of the money to the Vim project - which then gives the money directly to ICCF Holland and their work with children in Uganda.

Book Details

• Language: English
• Paperback: 228 pages [191mm x 235mm]
• Release date: May 2007
• ISBN: 1847190936
• ISBN: 13 978-1-847190-93-2
• Author: Kim Schulz

Book content in details

Each chapter of this book deals with a different aspect, and provides recipes for easy-to-use hacks to customize and simplify your Vim experience. After an introduction covering the derivation of Vim and its relatives from the vi editor, the author explains basic changes that you can make to the appearance of the Vim editor. Further chapters cover improved navigation through files and buffers in Vim; speeding up your work with templates, auto-completion, folding, sessions, and registers; and formatting text and code, including using external formatting scripts. The final comprehensive chapter covers everything about using Vim scripts and scripting to extend functionality.

Vim stands for Vi IMproved and is the editor of choice for programmers looking for a highly configurable, stable, open-source, multi-platform text editor. It is included with almost every Linux distribution as the standard text editor, and can be used to work with source code from any language. A big advantage of using Vim is that it can be extensively customized; you can control the basic interface, define personalized key mappings, implement macros, and call external or user-defined scripts. Vim has its own scripting language that allows for plug-in like extensions to enable IDE behavior, syntax scripts and highlighting, color schemes, themes, and utility scripts that can add a wide range of features and functionality.
Vim 7.0, for which this book is written, includes spell-checking, code completion, document tabs, current line and column highlighting, undo branches, and more.

• Chapter 1 introduces Vim and a few well-known relatives; their history and relation to vi is briefly described.
• Chapter 2 introduces how to make Vim a better editor for you by modifying it for your personal needs. It shows us ways of modifying fonts, the color scheme, the status line, menus, and toolbar.
• Chapter 3 introduces some of the ways in which Vim helps us to navigate through files easily. It explains an alternative way for boosting navigation through files and buffers in Vim.
• Chapter 4 introduces you to features in Vim. It describes how to use templates, auto-completion, folding, sessions, and registers.
• Chapter 5 introduces simple tricks to format text and code. It also discusses how external tools can be used to give Vim just that extra edge it needs to be the perfect editor.
• Chapter 6 is especially for those who want to learn how to extend Vim with scripts. The chapter introduces scripting basics, how to use and install/uninstall scripts, debugging scripts, and lots more.
• Appendix A has a listing of games that have been implemented with Vim scripting; it also provides an overview of chat and mail scripts and has a section on using Vim as an IDE.
• Appendix B shows how to keep your Vim configuration files well organized and how to retain your Vim configuration across computers by storing a copy of it online