Vim

Introduction

The screen-oriented text editor vim stems from vi, written in '76 for an early BSD Unix release by Bill Joy. vi is old, nonintuitive, and complex. vim stems from 1991, and stands for Vi IMproved, but its improvements do not lessen it's nonintuitivity or complexity.

So why do we feel that vim is an essential system tool? Well, it's because

• vi can be found on just about any Linux and Unix system
• vi is very powerful
• with some practice, it's even usable.

Installation and configuration

When you install vim, you also get xxd, a tool to make a hexdump, or convert a hex dump back to it's original binary form.