"Was ist Vim?"
	Eine Antwort in sechs Kilobytes.
Was ist Vim?  Eine Antwort in 2222 bytes:

Vim ("Vi IMproved") ist ein "Vi Klon", dh
ein Programm, dass dem Editor "Vi" aehnlich ist.

Vim funtioniert im Textmodus auf jedem Terminal,
aber es hat auch ein graphisches Benutzerschnittstelle (GUI),
dh Menus und Unterstuetzung fuer die Maus.

Erhaeltlichkeit (Availability):
Vim ist erhaeltlich fuer viele Betriebssysteme/Plattformen
und hat viele zusaetzliche Eigenschaften (features)
(siehe dazu Seite http://www.vim.org/doc/vi.diff.txt ).

Betriebssysteme (Operating Systems):
Vim is erhaeltlich fuer die folgenden Betriebssysteme:
AmigaOS, Atari MiNT, BeOS, DOS, MacOS, NextStep, OS/2, OSF,
RiscOS, SGI, UNIX, VMS, WIn16 + Win32 (Windows95/98/00/NT) -
und vor allem fuer FreeBSD und Linux.  :-)

Copyright/Lizenz (Copyright):
Das Copyright ist in den Haenden von dem Hauptautor
	Bram Moolenaar <bram@vim.org>.
Vim ist "charity-ware" ("Naechstenliebe"), dh Sie werden dazu
ermutigt eine Spende an Waisenkinder in Uganda zu machen
(siehe ":help uganda").

Source:
Vim is "OpenSource", dh der Quellcode fuer das Programm ist fuer
jeden frei erhaeltlich , und man darf Aenderungen daran vornehmen.
(siehe http://www.opensource.org/certification-mark.html )

=== Features

Editor für Anfänger - Benutzerfreundlich:
Vim ist weitaus leichter zu erlernen als Vi wegen der großen Dokumentation;
das Kommando "undo" macht die Änderungen schrittweise rückgängig, und
falls man dabei zu weit geht, kann man mit "redo" wieder vorwärts gehen.
Bei Fehler sind kein Problem - einfach "zurückgehen".
Außerdem bietet Vim konfigurierbare Menüs und Unterstützung für die Maus.

Character codes and Terminals:
Vim has support for the iso-latin1 character set and for termcap.
(Vanilla Vi has problems with this.)

Characters and Languages:
Vim supports for right-to-left editing (eg with Arabian, Farsi, Hebrew),
and multi-byte texts, ie languages with graphical characters represented
by more than one "byte", such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean (Hangul),
(Technically speaking, Vim supports text in UTF-8 and Unicode.)

Text Formatting and Visual Mode:
With Vim you can select text "visually" (with highlighting) before you
"operate" on it, eg copy, delete, substitute, shift left or right,
change case of letters or format the text incl preserving indented text.
Vim allows selection and operations on rectangular text blocks, too.

Completion Commands:
Vim has commands which complete your input -
either with commands, filenames, and words.

Automatic Commands:
Vim also has "autocommands" for automatic execution of commands
(eg automatic uncompression of compressed files).

Digraph Input:
Vim allows you to enter special characters by a combination
of two characters (eg the combination of " and a yields an ä) -
and allows you to define other combinations, too.

Fileformat detection and conversion:
Vim automatically recognizes the type of files (DOS, Mac, Unix)
and also lets you save them in any other format  -
no need for unix2dos on Windows any more!

History:
Vim has a "history" for commands and searches, so you can
recall previous commands or search pattern to edit them.

Macro Recording:
Vim allows to "record" your editing for replaying for repetitive tasks.

Memory Limits:
Vim has much higher memory limits for line length
and buffer sizes than vanilla Vi.

Multiple Buffers and Split Screen:
Vim allows editing of multiple buffers and you can split the
screen into many subwindows (both horizontally and vertically),
so you can see many files or many parts of some files.

Number Prefix to commands:
Vim allows a number prefix for more
commands than with Vi (eg for "put").

Runtime Files (Helpfiles and Syntax Files):
Vim comes with 70 help files on various aspects of editing;
some texts are specifically for use on some operating system.

Scripting:
Vim has a built-in scripting language for easy extension.

Search Offset:
Vim allows offsets for search commands, so you
place the cursor *after* the found text.

Session Recovery:
Vim allows to store information of an editing session into a file ("viminfo")
which allows them for being used with the next editing session, eg
buffer list, file marks, registers, command and search history.

Tab expansion:
Vim can expand tabs within the text with spaces (expandtab, :retab).

Tag system:
Vim offers to find text in files by using an index with "tags"
together with many tag stack commands.

Text Objects:
Vim knows more text objects (paragraphs, sentences, words and WORDS -
all with and without surrounding whitespace) and allows to configure
the definition for these objects.

Syntax Coloring:
Vim shows text in color - according to its "(programming) language".
You can define the "language" ("syntax") of the files yourself.

Vim comes with 200+ syntax files for colorizing text in
common programming languages (Ada, C, C++, Eiffel, Fortran,
Haskell, Java, Lisp, Modula, Pascal, Prolog, Python,
Scheme, Smalltalk, SQL, Verilog, VisualBasic),
math programs (Maple, Matlab, Mathematica, SAS), markup text
(DocBook, HTML, LaTeX, PostScript, SGML-LinuxDoc, TeX, WML, XML),
program output (diff, man), setup files of programs (4DOS, Apache,
autoconfig, BibTeX, CSS, CVS, elm, IDL, LILO, pine, procmail, samba, slrn),
shell scripts and setups (shells: sh, bash, csh, ksh, zsh),
script languages  (awk, Perl, sed, yacc)
system files (printcap, .Xdefaults) and
of course for Vim and its helptexts.

Special code:
Vim has optional integration with Perl, Tcl and Python.
Vim can act as an OLE automation server under Windows.
Vim can also be installed with code for X-windows,
adding configurable menus and support for the mouse.
And more.  Lots more!

Vim's HomePage in the WWW:
  http://www.vim.org/

For a more elaborate description
of Vim's features see the page
  http://www.vim.org/why.html

Written by:  Sven Guckes guckes@vim.org
Last update: Tue Oct 03 20:00:00 MET DST 2000