README

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 What is Vim?

Vim is a greatly improved version of the good old UNIX editor
Vi.  Many new
features have been added: multi-level undo, syntax highlighting, command line
history, on-line help, spell checking, filename completion, block operations,
script language, etc.  There is also a Graphical User Interface (GUI)
available.  Still, Vi compatibility is maintained, those who have Vi "in the
fingers" will feel at home.
See runtime/doc/vi_diff.txt for differences with
Vi.

This editor is very useful for editing programs and other plain text files.
All commands are given with normal keyboard characters, so those who can type
with ten fingers can work very fast.  Additionally, function keys can be
mapped to commands by the user, and the mouse can be used.

Vim also aims to provide a (mostly) POSIX-compatible vi implementation, when
compiled with a minimal feature set (typically called vim.tiny), which is used
by many Linux distributions as the default vi editor.

Vim runs under MS-Windows (7, 8, 10, 11), macOS, Haiku, VMS and almost all
flavours of UNIX.  Porting to other systems should not be very difficult.
Older versions of Vim run on MS-DOS, MS-Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista,
Amiga DOS, Atari MiNT, BeOS, RISC OS and OS/2.  These are no longer maintained.

For Vim9 script see README_VIM9.

 Distribution

You can often use your favorite package manager to install Vim.  On Mac and
Linux a small version of Vim is pre-installed, you still need to install Vim
if you want more features.

There are separate distributions for Unix, PC, Amiga and some other systems.
This README.md file comes with the runtime archive.  It includes the
documentation, syntax files and other files that are used at runtime.  To run
Vim you must get either one of the binary archives or a source archive.
Which one you need depends on the system you want to run it on and whether you
want or must compile it yourself.  Check https://www.vim.org/download.php for
an overview of currently available distributions.

Some popular places to get the latest Vim:
 Check out the git repository from GitHub.
 Get the source code as an archive.
 Get a Windows executable from the
vim-win32-installer repository.

 Compiling

If you obtained a binary distribution you don't need to compile Vim.  If you
obtained a source distribution, all the stuff for compiling Vim is in the
src directory.  See src/INSTALL for instructions.

 Installation

See one of these files for system-specific instructions.  Either in the
READMEdir directory (in the repository) or
the top directory (if you unpack an archive):


README_ami.txt		Amiga
README_unix.txt		Unix
README_dos.txt		MS-DOS and MS-Windows
README_mac.txt		Macintosh
README_haiku.txt	Haiku
README_vms.txt		VM

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