Vim is an efficient text editor that, unlike Notepad, lets you do everything in a keyboard-centric area. Its many function keys and modes allow you to quickly complete complex editing tasks, and it’s especially useful for editing programming code. Vim takes time to learn, but it’s well worth the effort.
The software called Vim is a text editor, in the same mold as Windows Notepad, which most people are familiar with. It’s called a “super notepad” because it’s so efficient at editing text. Vim is primarily used for editing computer program code, but it has also found many applications for editing other text, such as plain documents and data files. If you edit a lot of text, you’d be remiss not to give Vim a try.
Compared to Notepad, the main advantage of Vim is that it allows you to complete all complex editing tasks quickly and easily without having to leave the middle of the keyboard with both hands while editing text. When editing text in Notepad, you type on the middle section of the keyboard, move the cursor on the arrow keys, and perform complex operations like copy-and-paste with the mouse. Moving my right hand between the center of the keyboard, the arrow keys, and the mouse can be time-consuming, disruptive, and frustrating. With Vim, however, you can complete all complex editing tasks using just the middle section of the keyboard.
For example, to move the cursor, you usually use the arrow keys or the mouse, but in Vim, pressing “j” (or “k”) moves the cursor down (or up), and pressing “h” (or “l”) moves the cursor left (or right). By moving the cursor with these four keys – “h”, “j”, “k”, and “l” – right under your right hand, you’re completely free from the inconvenience of reaching for the arrow keys. In addition to this, you can press “w” to move the cursor to the next word and “b” to move to the previous word. Similarly, you can move the cursor to the next or previous paragraph, to the first or last character in a line, to the top or bottom of the screen, to any position in an instant, completely free of the mouse and with both hands always focused on the central area of the keyboard.
This naturally begs the question. If “h”, “j”, “k”, and “l” act as arrow keys, how can we type the four characters “h”, “j”, “k”, and “l”? The answer is “modes”. Vim has roughly two modes: normal mode and insert mode. In normal mode, all keys are “function keys”, with “h”, “j”, “k”, and “l” acting as arrow keys. In Insert mode, you can type as you would in a normal notepad, so “h”, “j”, “k”, and “l” will type the corresponding characters. To go from insert mode to normal mode, you can press Esc. To go from normal mode to insert mode, there are several ways to do it, the simplest of which is to press “i”. When you’re editing with Vim, you’ll be switching between the two modes frequently.
Normal mode is obviously not just for cursor movement. Once in normal mode, you can cut, duplicate, and paste much more efficiently than in Notepad. To cut or duplicate in Notepad, you must first select the target character with your mouse and press “ctrl+x” or “ctrl+c” on your keyboard. No matter how fast your hands are, this destroys the relevance of your work. In Vim, however, you can accomplish these tasks in a split second. To cut a single word, press “dw”; to duplicate two words, press “2yw”; to cut a line, press “dd”; to duplicate a paragraph, press “y{”; to cut the characters inside the brackets, press “di(”; to duplicate curly braces and the characters inside them, press “ya[”. You can also press “v” to enter visual mode, and move the cursor with the keys “h”, “j”, “k”, “l”, etc. as in normal mode to quickly select a section of characters, and then press “d” or “y” to cut or duplicate the selected characters.
Here is a comprehensive example The current text given is “The quick brown fox jumps through the lazy dog” and the goal is to correct the typo “bronw” to “brown” and replace “through” with “over”. The current cursor position is after the “g” in “dog”. To complete this goal with Notepad, your right hand would have to leave the keyboard, grab the mouse, click exactly between the “n” and “w” in “bronw”, then your right hand would have to return to the keyboard, press backspace, hit the right arrow key to move the cursor behind the “w”, type “n”, grab the mouse again, double-click “through” to select it, and return to the keyboard to type “over”. No matter how fast your hands are, it takes a few seconds, and the process is tedious and easy to make mistakes. To accomplish the same task in Vim, type “Fnxpftcwover” in normal mode and you’re done. It takes less than a second if you’re skilled. It would be a long story to explain in detail what “Fnxpftcwover” means, but the short version is that Vim is usually more efficient than Notepad by an impressive margin.
Vim itself can only edit text files, but many popular software programs, such as MS Word and Chrome, allow you to install Vim plugins. Once you install the Vim plugin, you can switch between modes and edit text as efficiently as Vim in these software.
Vim’s capabilities are far greater than what is described in this sentence, and it usually takes a few months to learn and become familiar with most of its features. The need for study and training is perhaps the only downside to Vim. However, once you become proficient with Vim, you’ll be hooked from that point on, and you’ll never go back to using regular notepad again.
