Vim

VIM is a household name in the Unix world. To most, it is their primary text editor, used for day-to-day editing tasks regardless of complexity. I am starting a series that explores VIM and its uses, as well as how I utilise VIM in my development environment. However, we will begin with the installation. For most Unix installations, vi should already be pre-installed. You can verify this by running vi --version. In some cases, vi has been symlinked to the vim command and can return the help of VIM instead of vi, indicating that Vim is already installed. ...

As with many other technologies, VIM can echo messages, if you are coming from a contemporary editor, this can hit differently. First, the result of all the echoed messages is visible in the status bar at the bottom of the screen, Secondly, previous messages can be accessed with the :message command. To echo a message, enter the command mode (ESC or CTRL-C), then type the below command: 1 :echo "Hello World" This should print out Hello World to the status bar, but would not preserve the message for later reference. ...