Run a modern, focused, alternative to Vim

While Shashank Sharma is quite fond of the text editor Vim, he realises that it can overwhelm new users. Thankfully, a simplified variant is on offer...

- Shashank Sharma

OUR EXPERT

Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and an avid Arch user. He's always on the hunt for pocket-friendly geeky memorabilia.

Released over 30 years ago as a derivative of the original vi text editor with many additional features thrown in, Vim (a contraction of Vi ¡Mproved) remains one of the most popular text editors even today. Back in the 90s and early noughties, vi vs Emacs, another fiercely popular and feature-rich editor was a hotly debated issue.

Spend a little time on Reddit and you'll know the debate is far from over. Despite its vast feature set, Vim is also awkward for new users to master. Part of this is the reliance on different 'modes' to accommodate its many features and the large set of keyboard commands.

Distributed under the MIT license, Vem is an attempt to scale down some of the functionality of Vim, and simplify the keyboard commands on offer. Instead of being a full-featured text editor, Vem is a set of configuration files for Vim that changes how you interact with the popular text editor. While Vim boasts of hundreds of commands, with their own grammar to control work flow, Vem offers a far simplified editor, with a much smaller set of commands.

Despite using Vim as its base, Vem is distinct enough in its interface and user interaction to be labelled as an editor itself, rather than a skin, or interface for Vim. And even though Vem offers a limited feature set, as compared to Vim, it's still more than we can cover in these mere pages. Thankfully, Vem is exceptionally well documented, so you will find a tutorial for quick introduction to the editor, a complete user's guide that covers every aspect of its use, and even cheat sheets that describe all available commands on the website (www.vem-editor.org/docs/index.html).