README.md for version 7.4 of Vim: Vi IMproved.
Vim is a greatly improved version of the good old UNIX editor Vi. Many new
features have been added: multi-level undo, syntax highlighting, command line
history, on-line help, spell checking, filename completion, block operations,
script language, etc. There is also a Graphical User Interface (GUI)
available. Still, Vi compatibility is maintained, those who have Vi "in the
fingers" will feel at home. See runtime/doc/vi_diff.txt for differences with
Vi.
This editor is very useful for editing programs and other plain text files. All commands are given with normal keyboard characters, so those who can type with ten fingers can work very fast. Additionally, function keys can be mapped to commands by the user, and the mouse can be used.
Vim runs under MS-Windows (NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10), Macintosh, VMS and almost all flavours of UNIX. Porting to other systems should not be very difficult. Older versions of Vim run on MS-DOS, MS-Windows 95/98/Me, Amiga DOS, Atari MiNT, BeOS, RISC OS and OS/2. These are no longer maintained.
You can often use your favorite package manager to install Vim. On Mac and Linux a small version of Vim is pre-installed, you still need to install Vim if you want more features.
There are separate distributions for Unix, PC, Amiga and some other systems.
This README.md file comes with the runtime archive. It includes the
documentation, syntax files and other files that are used at runtime. To run
Vim you must get either one of the binary archives or a source archive.
Which one you need depends on the system you want to run it on and whether you
want or must compile it yourself. Check http://www.vim.org/download.php for
an overview of currently available distributions.
Some popular places to get the latest Vim:
- Check out the git repository from github.
- Get the source code as an archive.
- Get a Windows executable from the vim-win32-installer repository.