Pros and Cons of Vim 2024 (2024)

Syntax highlighting

Working in every environment

Easy navigation

Lightweight

Bundled in most Linux distributions.

Very efficient once you get familiar with it.

Fast editing.

Modular capabilities.

The efficient modal editing makes it very fast to write/edit code as I think of it.

The customization and wide range of plugins let me do very specific things and automate parts of my workflow.

The fact that it runs inside a terminal simplifies my window management and just becomes another Tmux window in my workflow.

Vim is incredibly light-weight with little to no dependencies and is almost guaranteed to exist on any GNU/Linux server that you have. You won't have to worry about managing package dependencies to get it on any system that currently doesn't have it. It won't ever hog resources or be the bottleneck in your coding/editing process.

Vim is highly configurable. I would say extensible, but really, it's the configuration and plugin capability that I want to highlight. It can function and look like anything you want - that's why it's so popular even with coders who want to optimize it for everything from C/C++ coding to Python coding. Syntax highlighting, code linting etc are all supported. But for just text editing and viewing, you can make it look exactly like you want - and then because of its highly portable nature, if you use Vim on another system, you can just grab the configuration file and voila! you've got it looking exactly like you had set up in seconds!

Vim promotes productivity. Really, this is a no-brainer. with all it's shortcuts, and ability to map keys to functions, it really makes viewing, editing, selecting, tweaking, text files highly efficient.

It has some esoteric functions that are really useful. So this point is something that I find is underrated. Often times, when transferring files between different Operating Systems, or even moving files using different protocols (saying you're using SFTP to get a file from one spot to another, or then you're storing it on NFS and then moving it locally, etc), you'll get weird issues with the file that may not show up unless you can spot the glyphs visually - that's where Vim comes in. It has the ability to show the corrupted portions of a file in a visual way so you can easily see which portions of the file are messed up

Never leave your keyboard. Vim modes enable you to not only edit, but navigate around a file or even multiple files without taking your hands away from the keys.

It is already installed on every non-Windows computer since... forever. And it is freely available on Windows as well.

Decades of personalization and plugins have been created so you can customize your experience to whatever level you desire.

There is a dedicated community and lots of resources for learning.

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!

Editing text with esoteric, but powerful keybindings.

Regular expression-based search/replace.

Function writing, ie. macros is simple and easy.

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.