Vim for iPad and iPhone review – Old school text editing in your iDevices

Our rating:

By: Applidium

Version #: 1.0

Date Released: 2012-01-19

Developer: Applidium

Price: 0

User Rating:

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If you don’t know what Vim is, probably the rest of the review won’t make any sense or be interesting. Shame on you! But just in case you are interested, Vim is one of the oldest text editors around. Fighting an endless battle against emacs, Vim has a strong legion of fans (disclaimer: I’m an emacs fan).

Having Vim (or emacs, for that matter) in my iPad or iPod looks like an awesome idea, and indeed, it is. Editing locally with my bluetooth keyboard is one of the best things to do: once you get used to one of these editors, anything else feels like writing with a stick in the sand: it works, but it’s not efficient.

Also, Vim is free. And one of the best editors around, of course. Yes, even if you prefer emacs, I can freely say this. There are cons, though. The first is that since iOS on-screen keyboard lacks an Esc key, it is currently mapped to \. Which is a very bad choice… But luckily, this can be easily changed to, for example, quickly tapping the jk combination (first j, then k) with :imap jk.

Changing the font is also highly non-intuitive, even if you are an adept vi user. You need to issue :set guifont=Courier:h20 (for a 20pix size). Found out in a post by the developer, meaning they care. That’s good, very good, because there are a lot of hidden tricks in this iOS port. If you are an iOS developer, you can grab the sources from git here.

If you are geeky enough, give a shot. If you have a bluetooth keyboard, you won’t look back.