GVim is my new favorite editor

I like using all kinds of editors, including the original ed editor, GNU Emacs, FED on FreeDOS, Edit on classic DOS, Mousepad on Xfce, and Vim on Linux. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but I find I’ve been using Vim for more things. I just like how Vim is like classic vi but with more modern features, especially code highlighting. And my fingers have “learned” the Vim commands, which means I can be more productive without switching to the mouse to scroll, select text, or use a menu. I can just type and it works.

More recently, I decided to experiment with GVim, the graphical version of the Vim editor. And you know, I really like it.

Download and run GVim

After installing, I found GVim in my desktop’s menus; just click it to launch GVim. You can also run gvim from the command line; this will automatically start GVim as a background process, so it doesn’t “tie up” your terminal window while you edit in the GVim window.

Note that GVim reads the same “settings” file as regular Vim, so GVim started up with my “retrobox” theme. My ~/.vim/vimrc file has these settings, which includes setting the color scheme to “retrobox”:

colorscheme retrobox
set guifont=IBM\ Plex\ Mono\ weight=450\ 14
set nohlsearch
set autoindent
set tabstop=4

I prefer the “retrobox” theme; with Vim in a terminal, “retrobox” uses muted colors with a slight “orange” hue, similar to what you might see on old-style amber monitors. I like “retrobox” because it’s easy on my eyes.

With GVim, “retrobox” also uses an off-white background color, which I found pleasant to look at. It’s not glaring white. Try exploring GVim with the different color themes; you can set a color theme with the colorscheme command in Vim or GVim. In GVim, you can also use the Edit > Color Scheme menu action to try a new color theme.

I also added a new guifont entry to my vimrc file to set the GUI font to IBM Plex Mono at 14-point. The “450” font weight gives text that is between regular (400) and “medium” (500) font weights.

IBM Plex Mono is my current favorite font for working in a terminal or editor, because it’s so easy to read and the italic type variant looks nice when displayed in an editor. You might also recognize IBM Plex Mono as similar to the original IBM Selectric typewriter “ball” font, which is another reason that I like using it.

Modern but retro

GVim gives me the same commands as Vim, but in a window with modern menus. If I can’t remember how to do something as a Vim command, I can use the menus to do it. For example, just use your mouse as usual to activate the menus, such as this example with the File menu:

I’ve started using GVim to edit all of my files, from source code to markup text. I’m still using the “retrobox” theme, which I think provides a good balance between readability and clear highlighting. Here’s an example of writing a sample C program using GVim:

Note that variables, keywords, regular code, quoted text, pre-processor instructions, and comments use different highlighting, while remaining easy to read. The off-white background also means I’m not staring into a bright white screen for hours at a time.

I find the “retrobox” theme also works well for highlighting markup systems, like this sample Groff file:

More to explore

GVim is developed as part of Vim, so you can find it on the Vim website, but most users will probably want to install a package. I run Fedora Linux, which provides the vim-X11 package. To install GVim, just install vim-X11 like this:

$ sudo dnf install vim-X11

If you use Vim, try GVim to run it in its own application window.