The vim editor has recently turned twenty years old and is still one of the most used tools in the arsenal of any UNIX guru (unless they are partial to Emacs, of course). Even today new features continue to be added and new users continue to discover the power of vim as the come in contact with it since it is still shipped with almost every Linux distribution out there.

The Vim text editor was first released to the public on November 2, 1991 [...] Although it was originally designed as a vi clone for the Amiga, it was soon ported to other platforms and eventually grew to become the most popular vi-compatible text editor. It is still actively developed and widely used across several operating systems.

The earliest version of Vim was developed on the Amiga by Bram Moolenaar in 1988. Moolenaar was dissatisfied with the vi clones that were available for the Amiga platform and set out to make one that came closer to matching vi’s feature set. He based his new editor on Stevie, which he has said was the best Amiga-compatible vi clone at the time. Unlike the other prominent vi clones, Vim is still actively developed and has a large base of contributors. New features are still being developed and added to the text editor every year, making it even more powerful. Moolenaar also still serves as the chief maintainer and does much of the work to make sure that contributed patches function well and are integrated properly.

If you want to celebrate vim’s birthday or if all this praise made you curious, there is now a handy web-based port of the editor that you can run straight in your browser.

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The vim editor has recently turned twenty years old and is still one of the most used tools in the arsenal of any UNIX guru (unless they are partial to Emacs, of course). Even today new features continue to be added and new users continue to discover the power of vim as the come ...