A Comparison of the vi & vim Editors

This page produced on a Linux machine that has both a vi editor and a vim editor. The vi editor as seen below, displays slightly differently than it does on a Sun machine.

The following is the html code that produces this page shown with the vi editor:

The following is the html code that produces this page shown with the vim editor:

The vim example shown is one that is "vi compatible". For vi haters (and I know your out there), setting :set nocompatible produces something quite different. A nice part about the vim editor is that the syntax highlighting is dynamic, so that if you produce a syntax error, it's very noticeable as the colors change. It also recognizes different types of programs and adjusts accordingly. It recognizes different system types:

Support for different systems:
        Vim can be used on:
        - All Unix systems (it works on all systems it was tested on, although
          the GUI and Perl interface may not work everywhere).
        - Amiga (500, 1000, 1200, 2000, 3000, 4000, ...).
        - MS-DOS in real-mode (no additional drivers required).
        - In protected mode on Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS (DPMI driver required).
        - Windows 95 and Windows NT, with support for long file names.
        - OS/2 (needs emx.dll)
        - Atari MiNT
        - VMS
        - BeOS
        - Macintosh
        - Risc OS
        - IBM OS/390

It has multiple undo levels, whereas vi has only one. It has an on-line help system. You can just go on and on... To be "Fair & Balanced" about the whole thing, I have to admit that vim doesn't have the paper clip helper guy.

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