#Textwrangler alternative jedit windows
Of course, there is no graphical preferences windows to do the customization in. There are various registers for saving text or locations, there is an increadibly powerful macro system, amazing searching capabilities, command line integration, there are specialized functions for programming… Really, when it comes to pure text editing chops, nothing beats Vim. And when it comes to changing that text, Vim is no slouch, either. But of course, you are not limited to just viewing one file at a time either: Vim supports arbitrary split views and can even be used for efficient diffing or merging. Usually, any place in the current file is reachable using just a few key strokes. Moving the cursor is especially powerful. Watching a seasoned Vimmer do his keyboard dance is something to behold.
Thus it should come as no surprise that you can do anything with these shortcuts at astounding speed.
And what shortcuts there are! Pretty much every key on the keyboard has some special function, most keys even serve multiple functions depending on what mode you are in at the moment. This is at really Vim's greatest strength and weakness: In its 'normal mode', all key presses are interpreted like keyboard shortcuts in other programs. In fact, in its normal mode it won't even type out the characters you hit on your keyboard. Since Vim predates graphical displays altogether, it does not adhere to its standards much. Everything is displayed in terms of rectangular characters, hence scrolling can only ever scroll one line at a time and there are no graphical images anywhere. There are no graphical drawers or animations or pixel-precise scrolling. The terminal inheritance limits its graphical capabilities somewhat. Hence, all of its functionality is really meant to be used from the keyboard only, even though mousing is supported these days. It grew up in text based terminals without any graphical windows or mouses. It is a more or less direct descendant of ed from the early 1970s.
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