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Vim Information Reviews & Insights

Score8.3 out of 10

29 Reviews and Ratings

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Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Vim are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

Vim has become the go-to text editor for users across various domains. With its quick and efficient editing capabilities, many users consider Vim their primary text editor and daily driver. Non-technical users find value in Vim's ability to reformat spreadsheet-style data into multiple lines with a non-standard delimiter, while developers rely on it for making quick edits to files like .bash_profile or editing text directly on Linux-based servers. Although its prevalence has decreased with the adoption of continuous deployment, Vim remains an indispensable tool for configuration management and development teams when debugging deployed software on servers. Additionally, Vim is widely used as a convenient editor in remote Linux servers where a full development environment may not be available. The streamlined text entry and manipulation capabilities of Vim make it the preferred choice for many programmers and network engineers when editing text files. Despite the learning curve, some users consider Vim their dream editor due to its potential for efficient text editing and coding speed. Moreover, Vim enables shared development workflows such as pair programming by providing a consistent Tmux/Vim setup on shared development machines.

Vim Reviews

3 Reviews
InformationComputer Software2Media Production1

Vim is Simply Fantastic!

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Vim is the primary code editor used for all of our backend development. While VSCode is used on the front end, the developers for the backend prefer the speed and power of vim. It solves all of our use cases.

Pros

  • Syntax highlighting
  • Working in every environment
  • Easy navigation

Cons

  • Being able to jump to function and symbol definitions in all languages
  • Better file management
  • Easier undo config

Likelihood to Recommend

Once you know how to use vim, you can edit any file on any Linux-based machine with ease.
DB
Don Burks
Director of Engineering in Information Technology at Bulletproof Studio Tools (Media Production, 1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Vim
25 years of experience
View profile

Vim: Good for quick edits, not great for other things.

Rating: 6 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Vim, from what I can tell, is used by most developers. That said, Vim is almost certainly not a developer's first choice, but instead is used for convenience when needed. Though I use it occasionally, it is usually used for quick edits of my .bash_profile or things like that--not necessarily editing full length programs.

Pros

  • Convenience! Vim is built into the Mac terminal, so that's nice.
  • Quick Edits! Vim takes virtually no time to boot up, so if you only need to edit a line or two, it's a great way to do that.
  • Looking cool(ish). Vim makes you look like you know what you're doing. Wow!

Cons

  • Vim isn't great for huge programs, at least in my own experience. There is no autocomplete, no GUI debugger, etc.
  • Vim's learning curve is certainly an issue.

Likelihood to Recommend

As I mentioned earlier in my review, Vim is great for quick edits and small file changes. It's a good way to do things quickly, but a bad way to do things accurately. Without autocomplete, spell check, and really any other sort of syntax checker, it can be easy to mess up.

Alternatives

Microsoft Visual Studio Code and Sublime Text
Vim is a text editor that strives for simplicity. It does that well, but when you need something at the next level, take a look at the above two. Visual Studio Code is a fantastic, free code editor that makes most of my workflow easy.
GG
Greg Garnhart
Research & Development: Product Intern in Product Management at Bandwidth Inc. (Computer Software, 201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
Vim
2 years of experience
View profile

Vim Review

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use it every day as a code editor as I mostly love to work from a terminal rather than jumping to other code editors. It's not used across all the departments, it's based on personal preference.

Pros

  • No need for a mouse/trackpad.l
  • I love CTAGS to jump between multiple files.
  • It provides some great plugins like vim-eunuch and Emmet.

Cons

  • The difficult learning curve for most beginners.
  • Feature discoverability like auto-completion is never easy, they should be well documented.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's very lightweight and works great if you're logged into some ssh terminal and you need to open some config or files. It really increases your productivity. It works great for someone working in languages like C/C++/Python. But for Scala/Java it might be bit overhead to use VIM unless all the plugins are well documented on how to install.

Alternatives

Atom, IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse
I use Vim for specific use cases and others for their own purposes but all of them are being used at my work every day. Vim has its pros like it's free/open source, has a mouse free interface, is lightweight and fast, and once learned is hard to forget.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Vim
5 years of experience