

Vim is operated by entering commands and even if you are running gVim, keyboard commands can still be used. Why the colon? Vim commands all start with the colon. These are not the only commands you’ll ever need but at least you can exit the application. A common joke is that beginners need to view the tutorial just to exit the editor!Īmateur hint: if you’re in the Normal editing mode, “:wq” will save your file and exit, whereas “:q!” will exit immediately and without saving. Even the GUI version in Windows, gVim, feels foreign to some Windows users because of the different editing modes. One of the main complaints about Vim is that it has a steep learning curve. With the undisputed speed advantage and a plethora of features available by way of plugins, Vim is still not for everybody. For example, there are a variety of plugins for C++ that offer support for syntax checking, code completion, and debugging. Furthermore, it supports multiple programming languages and can be customized using an extensive plugin system. Vim is popular among programmers because it provides syntax highlighting when writing code or editing scripts. Users can further extend this by creating key mappings to execute complex commands with minimal input. There are keyboard combinations for every action and an adept user can perform functions like search and replace very quickly. After somebody becomes accustomed to the hotkeys and keyboard-based interaction in Vim C++, it is highly efficient at manipulating text, on-par or better than current-day text editors. One of the distinct advantages it has over the typical IDE is speed. Vim C++ is a powerful and lightweight editor that consumes few resources compared to an IDE like Visual Studio. That said, it is a very powerful and widely-used editor and well worth discussing its capability for coding in C++. Vim is not a feature-rich word processor like Microsoft Word and it is not a full-fledged IDE, such as the ones that we have listed as the top C++ IDEs for 2021.


For the scope of this article, we will refer to our flavor as Vim C++. Whether it is being used to edit scripts, configuration files, emails, or C++ files, it is highly customizable and can be set up to work in a very simple way. It is often referred to as a “Programmer’s editor” but in practice, it can be used for all kinds of text editing. Vim is a well-known and mature text editor that is highly efficient at editing code.
