Often, we don’t really choose our text editor; we just keep using whatever we were trained on. A professor forced Notepad++ on us in university because he thought it was the least complicated editor that still came loaded with features. He wasn’t wrong, and I kept using it for years after graduation, until VS Code eventually took its place.

But those are tools for code, not prose, and prose is what I spend most of my day writing. So over the last year, I gave the writing-first apps a fair trial: Obsidian, Notion, iA Writer, and a few others I won’t bore you with. Obsidian won me over, enough that I folded a messy pile of note apps into it, and it is still my daily driver. Most of the rest I dropped inside a weekend.

And yet none of them, not even the app I open every morning, touches a tool older than all of them at the part that matters most: putting words down and then reshaping them. That tool is Vim, a keyboard-driven terminal editor from the early ’90s, with no sync engine, no AI sidebar, and no onboarding tour. You’d think something this old would have been outclassed years ago. At the raw work of editing text, it still hasn’t been.

Vim still wins at pure text editing in 2026

Editing text is the one job it never lost

Strip a writing app down to the part you spend the most hours in, and it comes down to one thing: moving through text and changing it. So the test I kept returning to wasn’t which app had the nicest sidebar, but which one let me reshape a messy paragraph the fastest. Vim wins it, and it isn’t close.

The reason is its grammar, and it really does behave like grammar. Most editors make you select text first, then act on it. Vim does it differently: you say what you want to do, then what to do it to. ci" means change inside the quotes, from anywhere on the line. dap means delete around the paragraph you are sitting in. Verbs and motions snap together like words in a sentence, and once a handful live in your fingers, a fiddly edit collapses into two or three keystrokes.

I will admit the first week feels backwards. You sit in a text editor and cannot get it to type a single letter, because you are in Normal mode and the keys are firing commands instead. Keeping a Vim cheat sheet within reach gets you over that hump in a couple of weeks. After that, almost everything happens on the home row, with hardly any of the Ctrl-Alt finger gymnastics other editors lean on, and a long writing day leaves your hands far less tired than they used to be.

Vim is everywhere, and it has plugins

A portable language, not a single app

Once the keys are in your fingers, Vim turns up everywhere. There are Vim keybinding modes for VS Code, Sublime Text, and the JetBrains IDEs. Browser extensions like Vimium let you scroll a page without reaching for the mouse. Gmail and old Twitter answer to j and k for moving down and up a list. The first time some unrelated web app responds to your Vim keys, it feels like wandering into a club you never joined, except you already know the handshake.

Now, a skeptic at the table would push back here, and they would have a point. What is truly everywhere on Unix is a vi-compatible editor, often a stripped-down build missing comforts like system clipboard support. Full Vim you usually install yourself. It is a one-line job, so it is hardly a knock, but it is worth being upfront about.

Plugins extend the same idea. The good ones do not bolt extra hotkeys onto the editor so much as teach it new words. vim-surround turns swapping the quotes or brackets around a word into a single motion. A commentary plugin makes commenting a verb you can point at a line, a paragraph, or a whole function. You are not stapling features onto a fixed app, but adding vocabulary to a language that already fits together.

Vim doesn’t tax your focus with fancy features

Fewer things between you and the page

Every modern writing app eventually asks for attention that has nothing to do with writing. A backlinks pane here, a template gallery there, an AI assistant leaning in from the margin, a sync icon spinning in the corner. None of it is evil. All of it sits between you and the sentence you are trying to finish.

The first thing I noticed after switching was how quiet the screen got. Vim opens to a plain file and nothing else. My drafts are just text files in a folder, which means I can search them with grep, version them with git, and never worry that some update will reorganize my library overnight. The second thing was how little the machine had to do. Vim runs happily on an old laptop, a Raspberry Pi, or a server I have shelled into, so the editor is never the thing slowing me down. The third, and the one I did not see coming, was the undo behavior. Each trip into Insert mode counts as one undo step, so a stray edit walks back in a single clean chunk instead of unravelling one keystroke at a time.

This is all anecdotal, of course, and a long way from a controlled test. But the share of my attention that reaches the writing itself has gone up, and I am not willing to give that back.

Vim is not for you if you..

An honest word before you switch

Credit: Tashreef Shareef / MakeUseOf

I would be lying if I said this was for everyone, and the people who love Vim most are the first to admit it. If you need to be productive by this afternoon, walk away now. The learning curve is real. It takes weeks before you stop fighting the editor and months before you are noticeably faster than you were, and nobody should sign up for that under a deadline.

If you want deep language support, with refactors and debuggers wired in, a full IDE will serve you better. Vim is a generalist that edits text faster than anything else, not a tailored home for one stack. And if you are picking it up for the street cred, that motivation tends to run dry long before the payoff shows up.

Sometimes the right answer is a quick sed one-liner, a proper IDE, or a plain editor that asks nothing of you. If the modal idea sounds like more effort than you bargained for but you still want a fast terminal editor, a friendlier option like the Micro editor hands you most of the speed with none of the relearning.

OS

Windows, macOS, Linux

Price model

Free

Vim is a fast, keyboard-driven text editor built for developers. It runs in the terminal, works on any OS, and lets you edit code and text without ever touching the mouse.

I use Vim because I can’t quit it

The old joke is that the hardest part of Vim is working out how to exit it. After a year of app-hopping, I have landed on a version of that joke I am no longer kidding about. I can’t quit it, because nothing else makes the writing itself feel this direct.

It is a poor fit for wrangling a sprawling knowledge base, and I still keep Obsidian around for exactly that and more. But the shiny apps all shared one weakness: I have watched editors come and go for years, and the Vim keys outlived every one of them, and will almost certainly outlive whatever I try next. When the goal is words on a page rather than a workspace to admire, the oldest tool on my machine is still the one I open first.