20 Years of VIM

VIM has now been out for 20 years. Ars has a nice article on it. It is my editor of choice on *nix based systems, but things weren't always that way. I remember when I first used vim (it may have even been an earlier clone, but probably not vi itself) , I hated it - it didn't make any sense. I was in highschool at the time, probably 14 years old. At the time I used pico since it was similar to MSDOS' EDIT.

It wasn't until I was in college that I truly got an appreciation for vim. I saw one of my professors using it to write code, and he was so incredibly fast it amazed me. It got me interested in how to use vim. Once you take the time to learn a few things about how it works, it's very useful. I still am a vim novice, I know enough to "miss" certain features when I am not using vim, but not enough to be a jedi master of vim (I'm a long ways away from that).

I'm going to take this anniversary as an opportunity to learn some new tricks in VIM. I wouldn't be surprised if I sum up some of the most frequent commands I use in a future post.

While I don't think software should generally have a steep learning curve, in the context of an editor for highly technical users, it makes sense to invest your time really learning an editor. The Pragmatic Programmer tells us to Use A Single Editor Well for a reason - there are real productivity benefits. I'm curious how many users take the time to learn an advanced editor like vim, emacs, or the ins and outs of something like Textmate. 


I think being under active development after 20 years is a pretty awesome accomplishment in software. How many projects have that kind of life span these days? A toast to you, VIM! To another 20 years of active development!