Vim is a beautiful text editor – I’m lost without it for editing any and all files on unix and Windows. I love all the simple editing tasks that vi/vim make easy such as moving lines or blocks of code/text around, joining lines, indenting blocks of code and traversing files. These are just the basics but they are so easy to use in vim without ever touching the mouse (or use the mouse if you prefer in vim). Other simple tasks such as searching for text or expressions is wonderfully simple and subtle features like search highlighting all the matches in a file is appreciated so I can navigate the file and visually see all the search matches without constantly hitting some find-next key. Text search and replace is also very powerful too.

Another simple feature I love in vim is the syntax highlighting for many types of files such as Perl source, SQL, VBScript, HTML, etc. Another handy simple features I love is visual parenthetical matching in my code – vim visually shows the parenthetical pairs no matter how deeply nested.

These are just the simple aspects of vim but used daily they make a huge difference in the joy of coding/writing and add to my productivity. I’ve omitted many of the more complex and amazing aspects of vim but you will discover those over time. Try vim, starting with just the basic editing, navigation, searching, etc. and I think you will get hooked. As a bonus, you will gain the basic vi skills needed to modify/search files and crontabs on practically any *nix system.