Searching for a new editor? Ok, try Vim.

There a lot of editors out there, all have their pros and cons.  If you spend a big amount of your time with your editor, as a developer, a writer, or whatever, you may want of find a powerful and fast editor.  It should offer the features you want, and it should be easy extensible.

One of the most common editors is “vi”, created in 1976 by Bill Joy.  It has been ported to all systems I know, and it is shipped with almost all operating systems now as “Vim”.  If you work on Mac OS X you can use it within the terminal or you download a Cocoa version of it: MacVim.

With Vim you work in certain modes (insert mode, command mode) and use keyboard commands to trigger functions (e.g. delete the current line: dd).  Since you have to learn a minimum amount of functions, the learning curve is somehow steep in the beginning.  However the time spent in learning, you’ll get back later (like always) as a much improved working speed.

Furthermore there are many extensions (plugins) available, e.g .for programming languages.

Here is a collection of links: