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Vim Reviews & Insights

Score8.3 out of 10

29 Reviews and Ratings

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Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Vim are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

Vim has become the go-to text editor for users across various domains. With its quick and efficient editing capabilities, many users consider Vim their primary text editor and daily driver. Non-technical users find value in Vim's ability to reformat spreadsheet-style data into multiple lines with a non-standard delimiter, while developers rely on it for making quick edits to files like .bash_profile or editing text directly on Linux-based servers. Although its prevalence has decreased with the adoption of continuous deployment, Vim remains an indispensable tool for configuration management and development teams when debugging deployed software on servers. Additionally, Vim is widely used as a convenient editor in remote Linux servers where a full development environment may not be available. The streamlined text entry and manipulation capabilities of Vim make it the preferred choice for many programmers and network engineers when editing text files. Despite the learning curve, some users consider Vim their dream editor due to its potential for efficient text editing and coding speed. Moreover, Vim enables shared development workflows such as pair programming by providing a consistent Tmux/Vim setup on shared development machines.

Vim Reviews

1 Review
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)

Vim - Thinking With Text

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Vim is my dream editor if I could ever get in touch with it fully. Most of the other developers and analysts here don't touch it as it has a steep learning curve. But the potential for such streamlined text entry and manipulation is amazing. Vim can be so close to thinking that the interface can disappear.

Pros

  • Never leave your keyboard. Vim modes enable you to not only edit, but navigate around a file or even multiple files without taking your hands away from the keys.
  • It is already installed on every non-Windows computer since... forever. And it is freely available on Windows as well.
  • Decades of personalization and plugins have been created so you can customize your experience to whatever level you desire.
  • There is a dedicated community and lots of resources for learning.

Cons

  • Without a doubt the hardest program to learn. It is a completely different paradigm of thinking compared to other editors
  • By default it doesn't have lots of fancy features you would find in larger IDE programs like code completion and linking
  • It lives in the command line so a user has to be comfortable with this interface

Likelihood to Recommend

There is a big investment in learning Vim, but if your career is centered on editing text files there is no better option. If a user takes the time to become adept they can greatly increase their efficiency. It is also nice if you are routinely on different systems as it can be found on workstations and servers alike. If you learn it, you will always have your editor available.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (Marketing and Advertising company, 11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Vim
3 years of experience