This 34-year-old open source tool is still the fastest way to write on your computer
Jun 4, 2026 | Guides
The next time you’re writing on your computer, pay attention to how much time you spend on editing text. How often you move the cursor. Or select some text to erase it. Scroll up or down a document. Jump around pages, chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and even words. Your hands are almost always switching between the keyboard and mouse when writing. These micro actions seem insignificant, but the time and effort they add up to are definitely not-so-insignificant. Imagine if you could cut them all out of your process. You could just wish a paragraph would disappear and instantly it would. Or just think about jumping to the bottom of a page, and you’d be instantly teleported there. Vim is a text editor built for that. It lets you edit text at the speed of thought.