Vim Mode

The Vim editor is exceptional in many, many ways, and it has been a staple of many programmers and writers primarily due to its keyboard focused approach to editing and its extensibility and flexibility. Vim is a fantastic editor to use within a terminal because it does not necessitate a graphical user interface and works fairly well when you are spending most of your time within that terminal.

Vim was designed and written at a time when graphical user interfaces were not as mainstream as they are today. I’ll never forget the first few times I attempted to use Vi to edit a file in college. A blank screen with just a cursor staring at me with no instructions for use and, try as I may, typing on the keyboard did practically nothing. I needed to track down someone with knowledge of the editor just to do basic things, and then I needed to commit those first few keystrokes to memory. It’s no wonder that I initially sought out the few graphical editors that were available to me at the time instead of sticking with it. Though Vim’s keyboard-centric editing features, once committed to memory, are incredibly efficient, there are elements of having a graphical user interface that improves on Vim. Ease of learning, discoverability of features, better view modes, and interactions with those features are just some of those improvements.

The marriage of the Vim editing experience and a graphical user interface has been attempted by many editors in the past but many of those editors fall short, relegating Vim mode to a second-class citizen — a plugin of sorts — instead of integrating it into the core experience. There was also many things about gvim (a graphical implementation of a Vim editor) that didn’t seem to work quite right to me.

This is one of the primary reasons TKE was created, to attempt to create a modern editor which integrates deeply with Vim editing functionality. Most editing features added to TKE are implemented for Vim mode first or designed with Vim editing in mind, making sure that Vim editing remains frictionless and central to the TKE editing experience.

If you consider yourself in the Vim camp and are looking for a great graphical Vim editor, give the TKE editor a try. It is hoped that you will find a terrific editing experience with additional superpowers.