Chapter 11. vim—vi Improved

This section is adapted from material supplied by Bram Moolenaar, vim's author. We thank him.

Other people began to use the program, liked it, and started helping development. A port to UNIX was done, then later to MS-DOS and other systems. vim became one of the most widely available vi clones. More features were added gradually: multi-level undo, multiwindowing, etc. Some features were unique to vim, but many were inspired by other vi clones. The goal has always been to provide the best for the user.

Today vim is one of the most full-featured of the vi-style editors anywhere. The online help is extensive. (It is described in more detail below.)

One of the more obscure features of vim is to be able to type from right to left. This is useful for languages like Hebrew and Farsi. This illustrates vim's versatility. In Version 5.0 the vi compatibility was also improved, and the performance was further tuned. Being a rock-stable editor, on which professional software developers can rely, is another of vim's design goals. Crashing with vim is rare, and when it happens you can recover your changes.

The development on vim continues. Plans for vim 6.0 include support for folding (being able to hide part of the text, e.g., the body of a function). The group of people helping to add features and port vim to more platforms is growing. The quality of the ports to different computer systems is increasing. The MS-Windows version will get dialogues and a file-selector. This opens up the hard-to-learn vi commands to a large group of users.