Learning the vi Editor, Sixth Edition

11.1. Author and History

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

Work on vim started when the author bought an Amiga computer. Coming from the UNIX world, he started using a vi-like editor called stevie. But it was far from perfect. Fortunately, it came with the source code. This is where work on vim started. At first it was a matter of making the editor more vi compatible and fixing bugs. After a while the program became very usable, and vim Version 1.14 was published on Fred Fish disk 591 (a collection of free software for the Amiga).

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, ...