# Vim Reviews **Vendor:** Vim **Category:** [Healthcare Integration Engines](https://www.g2.com/categories/healthcare-integration-engines) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 268 ## About Vim Vim is a highly configurable and efficient text editor, renowned for its versatility and power. As an enhanced version of the traditional 'vi' editor, Vim offers a comprehensive feature set that caters to a wide range of text editing needs, from simple note-taking to complex programming tasks. Its modal design, which separates editing tasks into distinct modes, allows users to perform actions swiftly and with precision. While Vim has a steeper learning curve compared to conventional editors, it rewards users with unparalleled efficiency and control once mastered. Key Features and Functionality: - Modal Editing: Vim operates in different modes—such as Normal, Insert, and Visual—each tailored for specific tasks, enabling efficient text manipulation. - Extensive Customization: Users can tailor Vim to their preferences through a vast array of plugins and scripts, enhancing functionality and adapting the editor to various workflows. - Syntax Highlighting: Vim supports syntax highlighting for numerous programming languages, aiding in code readability and reducing errors. - Multi-File and Multi-Window Support: Users can edit multiple files simultaneously, utilizing split windows and tabs to manage complex projects effectively. - Integrated Help System: Vim includes a comprehensive help system, providing users with immediate access to documentation and guidance. - Cross-Platform Availability: Vim is available on various operating systems, including Unix, Linux, Windows, and macOS, ensuring a consistent editing experience across platforms. Primary Value and User Solutions: Vim addresses the need for a powerful and efficient text editing tool that can handle a wide range of tasks, from simple text editing to complex programming. Its modal design and extensive customization options allow users to tailor the editor to their specific workflows, enhancing productivity and reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks. By supporting multiple programming languages and offering features like syntax highlighting and multi-file editing, Vim serves as a versatile tool for developers and writers alike. Its cross-platform availability ensures that users have a consistent and reliable editing environment, regardless of the operating system they use. ## Vim Reviews ### 1. Not just another text editor **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pilar M. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 10, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** VIM and GVIM are advanced text editors for advanced and not so advanced people. With VIM you can do whatever you need with the keyboard, without using mouse for anything; copy lines, move around the file, replace characters, etc, and with GVIM you can do the same, but with the help of the mouse to do some tasks and feel that you are working in Gedit or Notpead. **What do you dislike about Vim?** There are hundreds of keyboard options, that makes a bit difficult to start, and also after years using VIM some times you need to search in the shortcut list. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** It's the best plain text editor of Linux. It's fast and free. With VIM you can increase your performance as a developer or administrator more than you can imagine. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use vim for everything, edit configuration files, bash scripts and develop code. ### 2. Vim is a tool you should know, but I don't think it's a tool I'd choose to use **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Greg G. | Product Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** It's installed everywhere there is a terminal. Great for working on computers that you don't have an environment for development set up on. **What do you dislike about Vim?** It is not as easy to use as a text editor or IDE. As someone who frequently makes typos, VIM is great when I need it, but not great otherwise. It's like coding with a pen and paper, to some degree. No autocomplete, no indentation help, no nothing. You should still learn it, though. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Learn it - you'll use it if you're in the Software Dev field. I'd recommend using a text editor otherwise, though. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Coding on machines that I do not have my own environment on or making VERY fast edits to different files. ### 3. Amazing text editor! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Program Development | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 02, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** Vim is the best text editor for me. Since I work as software developer, I use VIM to write code, make files and all the stuff related with code developing. It's fast and there are hundreds of keyboard shortcuts to do all options to avoid the usage of mouse. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Everything is great in VIM, just as negative thing, needs lots of time to deal with all options that it has. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** It's the best text editor in all environments. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Basically I write code and Makefiles with VIM. It allows me to have different tabs with code, switching between them. ### 4. Best CLI editor **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 17, 2019 **What do you like best about Vim?** Been around forever so everyone knows how to use. Very powerful. Pretty much installed on any linux machine. Can customize the interface and colors to own tastes. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Takes some time to get used to. Every new machine needs to have settings file copied over to it so you can work the way you're used to. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Just use it. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Code editting. Make changes on any linux machine. ### 5. It's the vi you know and love with source and a gui! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Online Media | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2019 **What do you like best about Vim?** The original vi source code is not available. This is as good as it gets today with all the original features I used and more. **What do you dislike about Vim?** I haven't found a built in help system in it. Another now dead vi reimplmentation (elvis) had a much better help system. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** If you use *nix, learn it now and you will use it your entire career on *nix machines. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** I edit files on local machines as well as remote machines using this tool. ### 6. Essential software for a system administrator. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rosendo M. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 05, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** In my work as Sys admin I use all the time VIM, each time that I need to open SSH session I need vim to edit the configuration files or whatever that I need. VIM is like a multipurpose tool, that can be useful to much different profiles. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Vim it's difficult to learn, but when you have a minimum level, you improve your productivity progressively **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** It's simple the best. When you understand their functionalities and shortcuts you can work faster and better. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Basically I edit configuration files of servers, read logs or compare files. Also I use when I develop bash scripts. ### 7. The best IDE period! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Medical Devices | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 15, 2019 **What do you like best about Vim?** The combination of low resource requirement, platform agnostic, powerful plugins. **What do you dislike about Vim?** The learning curve is definitely steep but its worth it. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** The best IDE! **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is my primary code editor. ### 8. Great hackable text editor - a classic! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** Oh man. I love vim - it's the One True Text Editor. The keybindings and commands make working on software so much easier and faster. I really love extending it and writing code for it as well. It makes for a fun project, and is very customizable. **What do you dislike about Vim?** There's really nothing to dislike. The worst thing that can be said about this editor is that it's not very modern, but that's intrinsic to it so it's not really a shortcoming. It's simply very hard, in today's software world, to use vim as a daily driver for developing large software systems with lots of dependencies. However, the firs thing I do when getting a new IDE or editor is turn on vim emulation! **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's a great lightweight editor for small projects. I use it a lot for quick prototyping, as well as small school projects. ### 9. The best text editor for developers **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Program Development | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 02, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** Vim it's a text editor without format options. Just it's to get plain text files, normally of code or configuration files for example. It has hundreds of options, each one with a keyboard shortcut to do it fast **What do you dislike about Vim?** If you never use VIM before, it's difficult, you don't have a mouse available to do anything, therefore you have to handle everything with keyboard. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** VIM it's the best editor that you can use if you are a software developer or system administrator **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Basically I develop code with VIM. ### 10. Vim is among the best editors for developers **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Awanish G. | Lead Platform Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 20, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** Vim has loads of features and customization tools for editing. Autocompletion, search, looking up the definition of a function (using tag file), multiple tabs, string replacement, smart indenting, keyword colours are the primary ones I use almost every day. Not to forget, vim has a good documentation to lookup when in doubt. On UNIX, it even allows seeing the man pages of functions we are using. Having multple modes like editing, command and visual are all good. Editing huge files is supported by few editors and Vim is among them. I have used it to work with data file in a few Gigabytes. **What do you dislike about Vim?** The only issue with Vim is that the customization is all using the scripts and hence there is a learning curve involved. But once someone learns it, it becomes easy. There are lots of scripts already available on various websites, but probably there could be some direct links to youtube videos channels could be helpful. When most of the products have easy to use interfaces, being scripting only can be a restrictive proposition. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Among the best code editors available around, a must try. If the file to be edited is huge, there are just a few editors to support and Vim can become handly in those cases. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Faster coding is the primary benefit I get by using Vim. Along with other utilities like ctags, grep, sed Vim becomes a formidable tool. Autosaving is quite useful as it always keeps a backup of the previous opened version. ### 11. Vim is an excellent IDE **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alok H. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 30, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** The keyboard commands allow for fast movement and editing **What do you dislike about Vim?** Nothing, really. Some users dislike the tinkering and learning curve needed to use Vim, but I like that characteristic of it. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Absolutely give it a try for code. It requires a learning period, but that is vastly offset with the speed acquired on mastery. And it's free! **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use vim within a remote session inside of tmux panes. Within each vim instance, I am able to efficiently edit any code, text files, and even explore/modify the file system. Once I sit down to start working, I almost never need to touch the mouse or even take my hands off the keyboard. Additionally, with its keyboard shortcuts, there is a significant speedup to editing by speeding up processes that you didn't know were wasting your time. The biggest convenience is moving around the code. With "normal" editors, you get significant usage out of the Shift, Control, Home, and End keys to move around, along with the arrow keys. These movements take a long time and are a waste of time. Instead, with a modal editor like vim (or emacs), you sit in normal mode most of the time, where the keys don't input characters, but are mapped to various controls. Need to move to the bottom of the document? Hit G. No need to scroll down or hold the down arrow key or Page Down. Want to search for "functionName"? Type /functionName and you can scroll through all instances. No more Ctrl+F (or worse, menus accessed by mouse). ### 12. light wight work **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** James L. | Back End Developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 06, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** that it can be very useful in server side setting **What do you dislike about Vim?** the initial learning curve compare to other editors **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** learn it as soon as possuble **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** serverside work in which we need to work from a remote computer ### 13. Best terminal text editor **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 23, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** Flexibility, extensible, lot of community working around it so you have information on how to do anything. Being a terminal editor, you can use it everywhere, and since all the configuration can be backed up in a file, you can use it everywhere with your own settings. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Learning curve. The package managers are all external to it, so you need to choose and configure one instead of having one packed with it. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** It is one of the most complete and nice terminal editors you could use, but you need some patience to learn how to use it. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Editing text files, code or not, in remote connecting via ssh. ### 14. The best text editor of all time **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jake T. | Director of Development - Data Services, Higher Education, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** Vim edits text like a boss. You can move text around, make massive edits with substitution really simply and generally do all the things very quickly and efficiently. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Unfortunately, vim's GUI is less than stellar. Most unfortunately, it does not have proper support for folding code in a way that's easy to see. There's lots of hacks and plugins, but they're all just that: hacks and plugins. There's not an easy way to keep proper GUI-style interface features. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Learning vim is tough--the keybindings don't immediately make sense. But getting over the learning curve is 100% worth it. The pay off is huge. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use vim on a daily basis for the vast majority of my text editing--the only exception is when I'm using an IDE, in which case I'll turn vim keymappings on if they're available. I'm regularly pasting text into vim, making quick edits and copying back to whatever I need. ### 15. Awesome editor any linux/mac environment **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tanmay D. | Senior Software Engineer, Financial Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 01, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** It is very useful when doing native coding like in C/C++. This is also very useful in writing shell scripting. You can customize the configuration of vim editor and create your own shortcuts for editing. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Sometimes it can be hard to remember the shortcuts but as you spend more and more time with it will become your second nature. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Vim is a code editor. You can use it for editing any type of test editing as well. ### 16. Always on the Keyboard **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael M. | Lab Proctor, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 15, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** Vim is a great terminal based text editor. Though it has a bit of a steep learning curve for beginners, it has a lot of useful features once you learn it. The best trick about vim that I like (and probably wouldn't use without) is holding Alt with my thumb to use normal mode without hitting escape. I edit most of my small projects using Vim since it's fast and I can move around, modify, delete, search, and move things without ever leaving home row. **What do you dislike about Vim?** I was going to say I wish Vim had auto-completion or spell check, but there are plugins for both (spell check is actually built in but needs to be enabled). **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Start using it. It might be painful at first but it's great once you get it down. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Vim is great for scripting and small projects, and especially useful when you SSH. If you want to make it better for larger projects, you'll have to install some plugins for it. Without those plugins, I wouldn't use Vim for any medium or larger projects or large files since large scale navigation is not one of Vim's strong points (by default). ### 17. Great text editor **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 15, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** Vim is very easy to use, and provides the user with many options to customize their user experience. There are many editor commands that allow the user to easily navigate through their document. It is also an extremely lightweight editor, ensuring that the user does not experience lag when viewing or editing their document. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Vim is hard to learn and get used to. The traditional vim editor does not allow the user to use their mouse to navigate through their document. However, this can be customized. If the user becomes comfortable navigating through the document without using a mouse, it can be faster than using a mouse. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Vim has a steep learning curve, but is a great editor, and is worth the effort it takes to become familiarized with this editor. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Vim allows me to easily view and edit documents in terminal without opening up an external editor. I am able to develop code efficiently using this product. Because Vim is so lightweight, I don't need to worry about lag when viewing or editing my documents, or about the IDE crashing and losing my progress. ### 18. Excellent editor. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Networking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 18, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** - Edit mode. - Lot of shortcuts - Macros are powerful feature - Multiple files can be opened in parallel **What do you dislike about Vim?** - Wish it were a bit more powerful and had different modes like Emacs does. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** There is a initial learning curve, but you wouldnt have realized when you fell in love with it. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** I code a lot in C and C++ language. ### 19. Best multi-purpose editor **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Luca G. | Software Engineer, Computer Software, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 18, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** - Multi-purpose. It's not limited to one programming language, it can handle it all. - Multi-platform. I use it both on Linux and Mac OS - Works great remotely. No need to set remote disk bindings, I use vim through an ssh connection. - Vim is highly customizable, either by programming in vimscript or using plugins (see Vundle plugin manager). **What do you dislike about Vim?** - Performance is not great. It'd be great if vim was upgrade to make use of multi-processing. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** 1. Check out VIM plugins and the Vundle plugin manager. 2. Give VIM some time, the learning curve is very steep unfortunately, but you'll be so productive, it's unrealistic. 3. Vimgolf can help with the learning curve. 4. Every now and then, take the time to learn something new about vim. Updating your workflow will pay back. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** - Vim is my first and unique text editor for anything, ranging from Python, Java, SQL, simple text files. - After the initial steep learning curve, my productivity got drastically enhanced. ### 20. Vim is my editor of choice **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Austin R. | Application Engineer, Backend, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 30, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** Vim is completely customizable! I can make it do whatever that I need it to do and having so many years behind it, it has little bugs. There is also a great community around it so most of the time, there is a plug in for what I need it to do. You can make it a full blown IDE or just simple. It all depends on your style of coding. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Vim is completely customizable. It's greatest feature is also its greatest downfall. It has a steep learning curve and set up to get going. Once you get going, then it becomes easy. VimL is also a pain to learn but then it clicks after a while. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** If you have been programming for a while, then I would recommend taking the vim dive. It can be a steep curve so it's best to get some practice. When you feel like giving up, ask for help. There is so many people that you can ask for help. The ease of use is scale of "painful" at first but as you get going and customized to your needs, then it becomes delightful. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** When I need an editor, I can always count on vim to do what I need it to do. It has given me the least of amount of trouble and is always installed on our servers when I need to view things or modify something on the fly. ### 21. Most lightweight editor **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jim Ryan Z. | Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** What I like about Vim is that it's very lightweight and very customisable because of it's plugins. It also has support for code highlighting for various languages, skins and themes if you are into customisation. And because it is lightweight, it consumes just a little bit of your memory. THere's a ton of plugins that you can use that could be provided with by plugin bundlers like Vundle and the others. **What do you dislike about Vim?** What I dislike about is the learning curve you need to have it work for daily use, there's a ton of shortcuts to memorize and be familiar with in order to use it with comfort. Vanilla VIM is also something you don't want to stick to since it's very bland and not that user friendly, you really need to customize it to your liking in order to get the best out of vim. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Consider it if you want to have a lightweight editor that you won't even need a mouse that much to use it. It's really great for web development stuff. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Vim as my primary editor at work as a Ruby on Rails and Javascript developer. It's syntax is just right to not use it with any IDE unlike other languages. The use of the mouse is one thing I've noticed significantly, I haven't used it that much because of the keyboard shortcuts used by Vim. It's also kind of cool to use an editor right in the terminal in my opinion, I mostly work with the terminal and just having it right there makes it's seamless for me to switch between different kinds of work. ### 22. Vim review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rakesh K. | Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** Vim is a great text editor for linux. The shorthands makes it extremely useful to navigates, search, edit, copy, replace, paste, etc. Unlike a normal editor, we get to focus more time on the content rather than editing the code. **What do you dislike about Vim?** No automatic code correction or compiler unlike intellij or eclipse. If they could include suggestions or error handling suggestions, vim would be the top editor. It would be great if they can support atleast major languages like C, C++, Java, Python with different color codes for variables, keywords, etc.. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Must know for any linux user. Coding with vim will help you rather than the auto-completion editors. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Most of the company code I write is in vim. Source control like git is well integrated with vim and hence it is a top choice for most of the code I write. It is a must know for all linux users to realise the efficiency of linux. ### 23. The Arch of Editor **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chuanyui T. | Software Development Engineer, Internet, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 01, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** With available Plugins online, you can easily turn your terminal in vim into a powerful IDE. **What do you dislike about Vim?** With the big learning curve, beginners usually struggle and give up. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Hang in there with the struggle. You will definitely not regret and become a wizard to editing. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Everything code editing. If a team has no preference over any editor, I will suggest everyone to use Vim. The benefits is that everyone will personalized their vim settings with plugins or remaps. ### 24. Lightweight text editor **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pedro Andrés B. | Software Engineer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** Its ubiquity: it is installed on almost every Linux server. **What do you dislike about Vim?** It was uncomfortable to get used to it at the beginning **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** You will love it once you make sense of it **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** It allows me to edit text files right in the server through the Linux command-line or console ### 25. Fast for touch typers **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 02, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** Vim allows you to edit text at high speed due to muscle memory. This means you don't have to lose your flow when coding. It is also universally available on all Linux/Unix systems. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Vim has a very steep learning curve. In fact, over 1.5 million people have gone to Stack Overflow just to find out how to quit Vim! There is also the need to setup plugins if you need more than just a minimalist text editor. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Be prepared to put in time and effort to master Vim. It's gonna be worth it in the long run! **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Vim is universally available on almost all servers and OSes. This has allowed our team to solve problems quickly with minimal setup time. It is also one of the "standard" editors in the developer/ops community and hence allows us to share plugins and configurations easily. ### 26. Worth the learning curve **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sam B. | Instructor, Higher Education, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 25, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** I started using vim about 5 years ago. I made a commitment to learn the basics, and have been growing that knowledge over time. I can type code in vim faster than people who are much faster typists than me in other editors. Staying on the keyboard is the key to efficiency. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Really only that I haven't learned it all yet. I know there is more power in vim than I currently leverage, but I haven't taken the time to commit it all to muscle memory. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Totally worth the effort to learn. And it can boost your feeling of self-superiority :) **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** I build and maintain software. vim is my friend on my local Ubuntu machine, my home OSX machine, and on our remote servers that run our code. one environment everywhere. ### 27. Best editor in the world! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Christophere J. | PHP Developer, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 25, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** Vim is such a versatile editor! Whether your a ruby developer, php, any type of developer can set up vim to how every you like! The modal editing is so addictive, I could not go back to using the arrow keys or mouse again. **What do you dislike about Vim?** The learning ramp seems to be a bit steep, and it really seems to scare a lot of people. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Take the time to learn vim. And I guarantee that you will start being more effecient working on projects and questioning other editors. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** It has help me be more effecient when working and if I find my self doing really repetitive tasks I can always script them or make a binding that handles it. ### 28. A powerful but complex editor **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jon J. | Software Engineer, Sports, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 12, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** VIM is a ubiquitous, lightweight, and immensely powerful editor. Just about every non-Windows environment will have VIM installed (and the Windows gVIM version is a quick free download). Once you learn the keyboard shortcuts, VIM allows you to navigate, search, and manipulate files more efficiently than any other editor. It's also highly configurable and has a huge collection of useful plugins. **What do you dislike about Vim?** While not necessarily a criticism, the learning curve for VIM is steep. Until learning a good portion of the commands, using VIM will likely slow you down. However, once you get up to speed it gives you more control than any other editor. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Thoroughly read a good tutorial (I recommend Daniel Miessler's) before trying to use it as your primary editor. Spending some time learning the commands upfront will prevent a lot of frustration. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** VIM is my go-to editor when I need access to an editor from a terminal window. I use it regularly to edit files on a remote server. ### 29. Efficient use of keyboard **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Mechanical or Industrial Engineering | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** Mouse less typing is fun. I love the simplycity of modal interface. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Learning curve is little high but once you cross that mark its smooth sailing. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** If you can't use vim applicaton many editors supports vim bindings so that you can use standard vim experiance across diffrent tools and platforms. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Coding and writing simple ascii markdown documents ### 30. It's Not As Scary As You Think **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Trevor L. | Junior Quality Assurance Engineer, Hospital & Health Care, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 01, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** The biggest thing vim has over nano (and other CLI text editors I've used) is its lack of persistent control / nav bar. You have the entire terminal window at your disposal for editing, which I really appreciate. The common bash on vim is not knowing its commands, but once you learn how to enter INSERT mode, save, and quit, what else do you really need? **What do you dislike about Vim?** The obvious answer is the learning curve. Vim has a ton of stuff that I never use, that is practically impossible to discover yourself without extensive research. Considering the "How to exit VIM" question on Stackoverflow is apparently one of the most frequently viewed questions on the site is saying something about discoverability. (Hint, it's ' : ' to enter command mode, and q to quit) **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** The most important commands to learn are how to change modes, and how to quit with / without saving. There are of course tons of other features of VIM (there's a reason it's been around for over 2 decades), and you can look those up as you need them, but out of the box, the ease and simplicity of just opening a file, editing it, saving and quitting is way smoother with vim than any other CLI text editor I've used before. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Vim as an easy way to quickly edit files on a VPS. Plaintext files like env, conf, and plist files can quickly be edited without the need for git or FTP. ### 31. Everything you need, and more! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sky L. | Senior DevOps Engineer, Retail, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 11, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** Flexible, extendible and ubiquitous in Linux. Vim has all the bells and whistles of other IDE's and can be configured to be a truly powerful code editor. Once tweaked to your preferences it is a joy to work with and because it's available on most Linux systems it helps do know how to use the tool effectively. **What do you dislike about Vim?** The learning curve is a bit steep, pasting can be a pain until configured properly. It's also really hard to escape... I have been using it so long now that get frustrated using any other editor that maps keys differently. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Use it! It's the best thing ever. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** As a Linux Engineer I have used Vim on a daily basis for years. Even though I don't find myself editing files on systems very often anymore (what with configuration management systems and all), I still use Vim for all my coding in Shell, Python, Ruby, etc... ### 32. Simple and fast **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ivan R. | Software Engineer, web platforms, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 27, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** When you get used to use VIM as main IDE you move around the code much fast, you edit the code much faster, I tried to go back to other IDEs but I couldn't´t found the shortcuts and the well done way to interact with the code as VIM has. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Copy past outside vim is always a problem, there are some ways to fix this, but it doesn't came as default. Search is not always the best, but with some tweaks you can make it much faster. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** The ramp up is really hard at the beginning, but after 1 or 2 month working with it everyday, you will start feel the advantages from it. After 4 or 5 month using it, you will love it!. Then you will realice that you can configure more and more VIM, so you will have your own vimrc file, with some plugings, some macro, same new key maps. You are now a Vim users, and you are not going to able to use another IDE again. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Productivity, I´m much more productive using this IDE. First at all, you have less distraction on the screen, you work ALWAYS in the terminal which is great, I don´t have to switch between apps when I have to do something, I have everything in the terminal which make my work much faster and organized. I can add macro to everything that I use often which follow the VIM ideology, that write less do more. ### 33. If you like vi, this is the editor for you. **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Glenn J. | Sr. Systems and Security Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 20, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** I have been using vi since the early 1980's and really liked it. When I found vim I was so happy because I could finally do the things I used to do in Unix on a Windows machine **What do you dislike about Vim?** It would be nice if the editor could be started by using the program name, vi, instead of vim. :-) **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** If you liked to use vi from Unix or Linux and want the same experience on Windows, this is the editor for you. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Since this is a text editor it doesn't really solve any business problems. I find that since I am so used to using this editor style, I am just more comfortable using it. ### 34. Great for cross-platform development **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 12, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** Works great with old legacy systems, since it works with almost all operating systems. **What do you dislike about Vim?** There is a large learning curve compared to other text editors, especially when learning the advanced commands. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Compare to other editors **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Used for maintaining servers and job control scripting. ### 35. A no frills text editor that is easily accessbile from the terminal **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andrew H. | Software Engineer, Research, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 26, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** I like the key bindings that allow for quick and efficient manipulation of my code. I find it very convenient that you can use vim to easily read and modify files without leaving the terminal. **What do you dislike about Vim?** There is a steep learning curve to learn the keybindings. It will take some practice if a user is unfamiliar with using the keyboard to navigate their code instead of the mouse. Finding the best configuration and plugins for a workflow can be daunting. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** There are a lot of choices for code editors, Vim is one of the most lightweight and easily accessible. With the correct plugins and configuration, Vim is competitive against even IDE's. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use vim daily for code development and code reviews. The real benefit for me is that it allows a simple interface to my code that is not prone to crashing or using up system resources like some of the full fledged IDE's on the market. ### 36. Old-school power editor **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ty K. | Founder & Developer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** Vi and Vim are always there. Find a terminal window and typing vi gets you the familiar and useful interface. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Vim is not point-and-shoot. For newbies, just closing it or saving a file requires a check with Google. But once you master the steep learning curve, you never touch a mouse again. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Full-powered with regex, macros, assignable shortcuts without all the fancy UI **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Vim is what I use when completing tasks on an Linux-based cloud server. It's always ready to go. ### 37. Speed, extensibility and accessibility at its finest. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Noah H. | CTO, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 25, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** Vim is available cross platform and cross protocol, so whether accessing through a GUI or over SSH, Vim provides the same stellar experience. Installing Vim plugins is a breeze and customizing the look and function of one's Vim installation takes one as far as one wishes to go. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Vim does have a steep learning curve and active Googling will be required for a while. Vanilla Vim is also bland and lacking critical features that would be pleasant if they came bundled. Luckily, plugins can take care of all of these needs or a quick addition to one's config file, but for a new user, this may be very off putting. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Once you are past the initial learning experience, you will greatly appreciate the massive speed increases and robust community support. If vanilla Vim doesn't provide all the features you need, you can almost certainly find a plugin which will fulfill that requirement. If one isn't working with coding languages though, but rather markup (e.g. HTML) or other data formats, Vim may not be the best option and a tool such as Visual Studio Code or another may suit your workflow the best. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Vim enables rapid development in a heavily self-customized environment while ensuring all team members can rapidly resolve issues on a server or locally. It also is inherently productive and fast, so coding and debugging are greatly improved. It also works very well with tools like tmux making it a perfect editor for virtually any team that has to deal with servers in some capacity. ### 38. Takes a while to get used to, but a great product once you have gained a familiarity with it **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Preston M. | DevOps Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 03, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** Fast, feature rich, compatible with many OS terminals **What do you dislike about Vim?** Difficult initial learning curve. Some commands are unintuitive **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Text Editing ### 39. A powerful tool, with a barrier to entry **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 15, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** Having a powerful and fully customizable directly in the terminal is the biggest plus for me, and the reason I've still not moved to any newer editors that have come along. The customization and plugin landscape is great, and being able to pull my config quickly on a new machine - even a remote virtual machine - means that I can be comfortable anywhere. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Modes are hard. Using VIM inside of tmux means I have modes inside of modes, and that can really cause hiccups in workflow. When I work with someone unfamiliar with VIM, it can be a barrier to a good pairing session. I don't recommend switching editors "just because," when VIM takes so long to get good at. So I often have to switch to someone elses editor when pairing. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Editing, developing, building applications. ### 40. Long time user still discovering new dates **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Hardware | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 30, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** Customizable keys for every command, syntax highlighting and background templates. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Slow rendering when using multiple tabs. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Debugging and writing code is intuitive and easy. ### 41. Vim for non-development text editing **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 14, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** Keyboard navigation and macro recording. Never having to take your hands off the keyboard is an incredible efficiency hack. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Learning curve is steep. It is difficult to onboard new users because of this. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Check out Neovim for the next generation of the Vim editing experience. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Raw text editing when syntax highlighting and speed are a must. Vim allows for rapid documentation, quick edits, and increased productivity. Taking meeting notes is quick and does not disrupt the meeting while others wait for the clicking, selecting and reformatting to be completed. ### 42. Vim Editor **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ankush K. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 22, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** 1. Search and replace is very efficient. 2. split screen into 2 so you can view multiple files at a time **What do you dislike about Vim?** 1. you need to remember multiple commands. 2. There should be auto completion option while writing code without any additional installation. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Providing support for auto-completion while writing code. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using it as editor for personal or industry projects, I work most of the time on Linux and Vim is best I've ever used in Linux platform. ### 43. The One True Editor **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael R. | Software Engineering Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 11, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** Limitless configuration options, incredible plugin community. The editor modes make browsing & sniping text automatic and extremely fast. The learning curve ensures there is always something waiting to surprise you. Recent competition in the form of Neovim has pushed features to the next level, we now have asynchronous plugins, an embedded terminal. As long as plugins are configured properly etc, it is blazingly fast. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Not able to give it the "full project intelligence" of Intellij/Webstorm. Can be difficult to identify performance problems. VimL is horrible. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Editing text. ### 44. Don't be intimidated by Vim **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Christophe L. | Bioinformatics Specialist, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 27, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** Vim is a really great ligthweight, easy to use editor with high flexibility. **What do you dislike about Vim?** It can be intimidating for beginners especially with the different modes. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Don't be intimidated. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** An easy, light editor for scripting. ### 45. The difficult learning curve is worth the increased productivity and portability **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Justin B. | Data Scientist, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 29, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** Vim (or at least vi) is virtually guaranteed to be available on any machine you encounter. It is one of two extremely powerful command line editors (the other being Emacs) with a tough learning curve but huge payoffs in productivity. **What do you dislike about Vim?** Vim is very difficult to learn. For many, it's almost a rite of passage, but it is still ridiculous to have to look up tutorials on basic movements. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Take time to create a .vimrc file that suits your usage, and don't add lines to it without understanding what they actually do **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** My primary use-case for Vim is software development. ### 46. VIM is VI++ **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** It works just like VI but with extra neat features. e.g. line number of text, quick reg-ex type search and replacing **What do you dislike about Vim?** Can be hard to configure / setup some of the nicer features (progamming language highlighting) **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** Editing software. ### 47. Best editor for Linux Admin **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alba Samantha C. | SysAdmin & DBA, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 30, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** What I like most is the amount of features it has, you can make complex edits with this editor. Allows you to use several shortcuts for editing. Another advantage is the amount of documentation, the community is quite broad, it is an editor available for any Unix-based OS (AIX, HP-UX), Linux (Debian, RHEL, Open Suse), etc. **What do you dislike about Vim?** For novice users the learning curve is quite slow, it can be difficult at the beginning, because it's a different editor than the commons. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Vim is an editor that at first may seem difficult to use, but with practice and constant use you can see that it is a very useful tool for editing with features that are not available in any editor. It is the best editor I recommend for those who are in the world of server administration. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use it constantly in my work in the administration of servers, to edit configuration files, scripts, etc., in the servers that I manage. I constantly use the search tool, replacing text using Regex. I also used it on my personal machine for configuring the applications that I have to install, bash editing, etc. ### 48. An editor that's complex at first, but can very quickly be an integral part of your workflow **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Josh T. | Web Developer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** I like how efficient it is to use, once you've learnt the basics and more advanced features you will find that your writing code and using the shortcuts all become second nature. You gain a lot of efficiency from using all the shortcuts though, so they are well worth taking the time to learn. It is also by far the most customisable editor that I have used. You can literally change everything, my favourite thing to customise is setting up keymaps that can perform multiple key press with just one. **What do you dislike about Vim?** It is a very daunting prospect opening up vim for the first time. You will struggle at first and it takes a lot of getting used to. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Take your time learning everything first. I recommend watching the Vim series on laracasts.com. That helped me set everything up. **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** I do the majority of my code editing with vim, it is great as it's available to be used over SSH. ### 49. Navigating code with Vim **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 26, 2017 **What do you like best about Vim?** I like the simplicity of it. Unlike IDEs, you don't have autocompletion, code templates and etc. It forces you to do everything on your own. **What do you dislike about Vim?** The thing that I dislike the most is that simple tasks like copy and paste are more difficult than necessary. **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Check out some tutorials **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** I write all of my code using Vim. ### 50. Nice, easy to use text editor **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 13, 2018 **What do you like best about Vim?** - Easy to use - Has a lot more options that vi editor that I was using earlier **What do you dislike about Vim?** There isn't anything particular I dislike. Vim meets my requirements for online editing **Recommendations to others considering Vim:** Go for it **What problems is Vim solving and how is that benefiting you?** we were looking for an editor on the servers and an alternate for vi ## Vim Discussions - [Is vim any good?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-vim-any-good) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [what is the fastest way to use VIM](https://www.g2.com/discussions/52195-what-is-the-fastest-way-to-use-vim) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [What is Vim used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-vim-used-for) - 1 comment - [What can Vim be used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-can-vim-be-used-for) - 1 comment - [View Vim pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/vim/reviews?page=3§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-23+22%3A10%3A32+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=02b8e63e-7e6f-478e-9bf8-f14faf849f08&secure%5Btoken%5D=7c70dc680104d9e896d127cf6ba017b4e22fb1a8bd5696d627dae5c4677d9417&format=llm_user) ## Vim Features **Data Management** - Health Data Exchange - Regulation & Compliance - User Access **Operations Management** - Third-Party Software Integrations - System Interoperability - Integration Services - Interface Status Updates - Operational Support **Agentic AI - Healthcare Integration Engines** - Autonomous Task Execution - Natural Language Interaction ## Top Vim Alternatives - [NexHealth](https://www.g2.com/products/nexhealth/reviews) - 4.8/5.0 (99 reviews) - [Redox](https://www.g2.com/products/redox/reviews) - 3.9/5.0 (35 reviews) - [Iguana](https://www.g2.com/products/iguana/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (40 reviews)