# History and effective use of Vim

DevFeed: [History and effective use of Vim](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/history-and-effective-use-of-vim-21486.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-07-19-history-use-vim.html>)

Published: 2019-07-19T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Joe Nelson](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/joe-nelson.md>)

Topics: [Vim](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/vim.md>), [Unix](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/unix.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>), [Command-line interface](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cli.md>)

Tags: [article](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/article.md>), [blog](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/blog.md>), [effective](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/effective.md>), [history](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/history.md>), [intellectual-property](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/intellectual-property.md>), [legacy](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/legacy.md>), [plugins](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/plugins.md>), [posix](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/posix.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/systems.md>), [vim](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/vim.md>)

## AI overview

An article on Vim's historical development and effective use. It traces the editor's lineage from QED through ed, ex, and vi, and encourages readers to study Vim's core functionality, use plugins thoughtfully, and rely less on pre-packaged vimrc files.

## Source excerpt

2019-07-19 This article is based on historical research and on simply reading the Vim user manual cover to cover. Hopefully these notes will help you (re?)discover core functionality of the editor, so you can abandon pre-packaged vimrc files and use plugins more thoughtfully. To go beyond the topics in this blog post, I'd recommend getting a paper copy of the manual and a good pocket reference.