VEM
Run a modern, focused, alternative to Vim
While Shashank Sharma is quite fond of the text editor Vim, he realises that it can overwhelm new users. Thankfully, a simplified variant is on offer…
Credit: www.vem-editor.org
OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s always on the hunt for pocket friendly geeky memorabilia.
Released over 30 years ago as a derivative of the original vi text editor with many additional features thrown in, Vim (a contraction of Vi iMproved) remains one of the most popular text editors even today. Back in the 90s and early noughties, vi vs Emacs, another fiercely popular and feature-rich editor was a hotly debated issue.
Spend a little time on Reddit and you’ll know the debate is far from over. Despite its vast feature set, Vim is also awkward for new users to master. Part of this is the reliance on different ‘modes’ to accommodate its many features and the large set of keyboard commands.
Distributed under the MIT license, Vem is an attempt to scale down some of the functionality of Vim, and simplify the keyboard commands on offer. Instead of being a full-featured text editor, Vem is a set of configuration files for Vim that changes how you interact with the popular text editor. While Vim boasts of hundreds of commands, with their own grammar to control work flow, Vem offers a far simplified editor, with a much smaller set of commands.