Vim is probably the best integrated development environment. That’s what millions of developers around the world believe and use on a daily basis.
This is despite the fact that there are other commercial products that will help you to develop or organize code as quickly as you can, and without distractions too. Probably its biggest advantage is that it is a streamlined IDE.
For those who aren’t aware of its origins, VIM is really the next generation version of VI which was created by Bill Joy in 1976. VIM, on the other hand, which stands for VI Improved, was released by Bram Moolenar in 1991.
Regardless of its age, VIM has still released a new version in August 2010 and being open source is available on all platforms including HGH Windows.
If you’d like to use VIM, you can either install it from your package manager in Ubuntu or even download from the official VIM website.
Much like vi, VIM is a modal editor whose behavior is based on the use of meta keys which will determine whether the editor is in insert mode.
With that said, one can use it both via the command line interface as well as a standalone GUI application. One of the biggest advantages of using VIM is that it can be customized to a large extent and used to code with languages such as Ruby, PHP, Perl, Lua, Python, Racket and Tcl.
Being as effective as it is, Vim has been considered to be best text editors by readers of the Linux Journal.