If you code in Perl, C, C++ you will know hard it is to find a good editor that is feature rich and resource efficient. vi(m) is the answer. type vim on the command line and you will unleash the power of a lightweight and robust editor.

Are you looking for syntax highlighting? no worries. vim does it.

Exit the INSERT mode by pressing the ESC key. Hit the ":" (colon) key. then type "syntax enable" and lo behold highlighted syntax. this option can be permanently turned on from .vimrc in your home directory. This option also makes it easy to read log files and configuration files (*.conf) as vim applies syntaxing to these files as well. This makes it very easy to edit them and makes them easy to read.

Are those curly braces ({) giving you nightmares? cant find a lost curly bracket? vi(m) comes to the rescue once again. The "%" command helps you. Exit INSERT mode. Move the cursor to a parenthesis or brace and type %. vi will move the cursor to the corresponding parenthesis or brace. Hit % again and vi
will return to the original parenthesis or brace. This really makes it very easy to follow the structure of code especially on with multiple nested if conditions or multiple nested loops.

Still want more?? If you want to check every bracket or brace in the whole file hit '/{' then hit '%' two times this will check a brace and bring you back to your original brace. Hit 'n' to go to the next set of braces. This easy to use yet powerful utility makes it very easy to debug source code.

vim does so much and yet consumes very little of your systems resources. Does that not make you feel sorry for the bloated and over blown windows/gui based IDE/editing environments. It provides maximum efficiency with maximum benefits whit low overheads.

Hope this article starts you out on a journey to discover the various features of this poweful yet lightweight editor.