this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
553 points (97.8% liked)
Programmer Humor
19804 readers
724 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's a text editor. It all began with the ed editor, which is very simple and does one thing, it edits files. Then someone extended it into the ex editor. Then someone added a new feature: being able to visually see the file you're editing, which became vi, the visual editor. Then someone improved that, into vim. What began as an editor where you needed to be fluent in regular expressions but otherwise was simple, is now a very complex editor, moving the functionality of the old UNIX tools into the editor itself.
Thank you for explaining!
It's also available on nearly every unix-like machine since the 70s. So, super useful to know how to use. I personally also like (neo)vim as an IDE and its optional regex functionality because that allows once to efficiently edit massive files with minimal effort.