MacOSX Vim (Carbon GUI) v7.4.383

What Is Vim?

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems.

Vim is often called a "programmer's editor," and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It's not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files.

Vim can also be configured to work in a very simple (Notepad-like) way, called evim or Easy Vim.

What Vim Is Not?

Vim isn't an editor designed to hold its users' hands. It is a tool, the use of which must be learned.

Vim isn't a word processor. Although it can display text with various forms of highlighting and formatting, it isn't there to provide WYSIWYG editing of typeset documents. (It is great for editing TeX, though.)

There are currently two kinds of Vim for Macintosh:

• Using the Cocoa GUI. Also known as MacVim. This is the latest and is being actively developed. This behaves like a Mac application.
• Using the Carbon GUI. This is an older way of doing things and isn't updated much any more. This behaves more like Vim on Unix.

This is the Carbon GUI version.