What is Vim?
Vim is an improved (in many ways) version of vi, a ubiquitous text editor found on any UNIX system. VIM was created by Bram Moolenaar with a help of other people. It’s free but if you like it you can make a charitable contribution to orphans in Uganda. Vim has its own web site, www.vim.org and several mailing lists, with a wealth of information on every aspect of VIM. Vim was successfully ported to nearly all existing OS. It is a default editor in many Linux distributions (e.g. RedHat). VIM has all features of a modern programmer’s editor – macro language, syntax highlighting, customizable user interface, easy integration with various IDEs plus a set of features which makes VIM so attractive to its users: crash recovery, automatic commands, session management. VIM has a very broad and loyal user base. Over 10 million people have it installed (counting only Linux users). Estimation is that there are about half a million people using Vim as their main editor. And this number is growing.
VIM is a tool for researching multiple sky positions simultaneously. Each source becomes a row in a table, with catalog, image cutouts, and spectral information. This information is drawn from all the published surveys of the astronomical literature. VIM assumes that an astronomer wants information about a specific set of positions (points in the sky). The two types of information are catalogs and image surveys. For catalogs, proximity searches are performed with respect to archived catalogs, finding which of the input positions is near enough to a catalog member that the two might be the same physical object. For images, cutouts can be generated from the major surveys. Most of the worlds quantitive astronomical data is available to VIM, as with any Virtual Observatory application, including primary catalogs (SDSS, 2MASS, NED, etc), and also the long tail — the holdings of data centers such as NASA, CDS, and ESO, which have almost any published catalog. Sky positions can be input in t
Vim stands for Vi IMproved. It used to be Vi IMitation, but there are so many improvements that a name change was appropriate. Vim is a text editor which includes almost all the commands from the Unix program Vi and a lot of new ones. It is very useful for editing programs and other 7-bit or 8-bit ASCII text. All commands can be given with the keyboard. This has the advantage that you can keep your fingers on the keyboard and your eyes on the screen. For those who want it, there is mouse support and a GUI version with scrollbars and menus. Vim is an editor, not a word processor. A word processor is used mainly to do layout of text. This means positioning it, changing the way it appears on output. More often than not, the final document is meant to be printed or typeset or what have you, in order to present it in a pleasing manner to others. Examples of word processors are Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, FrameMaker, and AmiPro. An editor is simply for entering text. Any typesetting or layi
Vim stands for Vi IMproved. It used to be Vi IMitation, but there are so many improvements that a name change was appropriate. Vim is a text editor which includes almost all the commands from the Unix program “Vi” and a lot of new ones. It is very useful for editing programs and other 7-bit or 8-bit ASCII text. All commands can be given with the keyboard. This has the advantage that you can keep your fingers on the keyboard and your eyes on the screen. For those who want it, there is mouse support and a GUI version with scrollbars and menus. Vim is an editor, not a word processor. A word processor is used mainly to do layout of text. This means positioning it, changing the way it appears on output. More often than not, the final document is meant to be printed or typeset or what have you, in order to present it in a pleasing manner to others. Examples of word processors are Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, FrameMaker, and AmiPro. An editor is simply for entering text. Any typesetting or
Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is often called a “programmer’s editor,” and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It’s not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files. Despite what the above comic suggests, Vim can be configured to work in a very simple (Notepad-like) way, called evim or Easy Vim.
