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1. Introduction

Vim editor stands for 'Vi Improved'. Vi is the most popular and powerful editor in the Unix world. The Vi is a abbreviation for "Visual" editor. In olden days, the first editor on this planet was a line editor called 'ed' (and 'ex'). The Visual editor like Vi was a vast improvement over line editors like 'ed' (or 'ex'). The editors 'ed' and 'ex' are still available on Linux, see 'man ed' and 'man ex'.

A good editor will improve the productivity of the programmer. Vim supports color syntax highlighting of program code and also emphasises using different fonts like normal, bold or italics. The color editor like Vim will improve the productivity of programming by 2 to 3 times!! Programmers can read the code much more rapidly as the code syntax is colored and highlighted.

1.1 Install Vim on Redhat Linux

To use Vim install the following RPM packages on Redhat Linux - 

        rpm -i vim*.rpm
OR do this -
        rpm -i vim-enhanced*.rpm
        rpm -i vim-X11*.rpm
        rpm -i vim-common*.rpm
        rpm -i vim-minimal*.rpm
You can see the list of files the vim rpm installs by - 
 
        rpm -qa | grep ^vim | awk '{print "rpm -ql " $1 }' | /bin/sh | less
and browse output using j,k, CTRL+f, CTRL+D, CTRL+B, CTRL+U or using arrow keys, page up/down keys. See 'man less'.

1.2 Install Vim on GNU Debian Linux

To install Vim on Debian Linux (GNU Linux), login as root and when connected to internet type - 

apt-get install vim vim-rt
It will go download the lastest version of vim, install it, configure it, and erase the .deb file it downloaded. The first package listed is vim, the standard editor, compiled with X11 support, vim-rt is the vim runtime, it holds all the syntax and help files.

1.3 Install Vim on Unixes

For other flavors of unixes like Solaris, HPUX, AIX, Sinix, SCO download the source code file 

 
        zcat vim.tar.gz | tar -xvf -
        cd vim-5.5/src
        ./configure --enable-gui=motif
        make
        make install

1.4 Install Vim on Microsoft Windows 95/NT

For Windows 95/NT, download the zip file and install clicking on setup. Get the zip file from -

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