Vim is a text editor which you can use to create and manipulate files. Vim is entirely text/command-line based, which gives it several advantages over graphical editors such as Eclipse or gedit. In particular, Vim can easily be used over an SSH connection and only takes a few seconds to load.
Vim provides many advanced features, but many of them are turned off by default. If you want to enable them, you need to create a file named .vimrc in your home directory. You can then type vim commands into this file. Anything you put in .vimrc will be automatically run every time you open vim.
One of the most useful features of vim is the automatic vim syntax
highlighting. You can turn syntax highlight on with the :syn on
command and turn it back off with the :syn off command. By
default, the syntax highlighter assumes you have a window with a light
background. To have it use colors that show up nicely on a dark screen, you
should add "set bg=dark" to your .vimrc file.
In addition to the built-in features, vim comes with a set of plugins that
can extend its functionality. In our lab, these plugins are disabled by
default. To turn them on, you need to set the "load_plugins" or "lpl" option by adding
set lpl to your .vimrc file.
Vim has a really neat spellchecker which can (among other things) check the spelling in the comments of your C++ or other programs. To enable spell checking, all you have to do is set a language. To do this, add this to .vimrc:
setlocal spelllang=en_us