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Vim is an open-source (licensed under its own "charityware" license), modal text editor written in C and its own Vim script (or VimL) language. It traces its origins to the 1970s when Bill Joy developed his vi text editor as the visual mode of the ex line editor. The original vi text editor was a modal text editor that had no syntax-highlighting, was written in C and only had a command-line interface (CLI). Later, in the 1980s, the Stevie text editor was released as a clone of the vi text editor for the Atari ST family of personal computers. Then, in 1991, Bram Moolenaar tried to port Stevie to the Amiga family of personal computers and Vim (abbreviated from Vi IMproved) was born. Vim eventually gained a graphical user interface (along with its CLI) which is called gVim, syntax-highlighting, its own scripting language (for customizing and extending it) and support for far more computing platforms.

It is one of the most popular text editors for Linux, and has been ported to every major operating system, including: AmigaOS, Linux, macOS, Windows NT and the BSDs. Being a modal text editor it is designed to be a more efficient text editor, allowing users to do everything without ever leaving the home row (on their keyboard). It is in the official repositories of Fedora.

On Fedora, Vim (specifically the subpackage vim-minimal) is also used to provide /bin/vi. This vi command provides no syntax-highlighting for opened files, by default, just like the original vi editor.

Installation

To install Vim via DNF merely run:

$ sudo dnf install vim

Features

On Fedora Vim comes with out-of-the-box syntax-highlighting (or colouring) support for most (if not every) popular computer language. It even has syntax-highlighting support for RPM spec files (which are used for building RPM packages).