Vi has been around for a long time, developed around 1976, offering users traditional yet powerful features such as an effective editing interface, terminal control, and more.

However, it lacked certain appealing features like multiple screens, syntax highlighting, and multi-level undo functionality—features that many Unix/Linux users desired in a complete text editor.

Thus, Vim (Vi Improved) was created to provide users with a fully-featured, advanced, and comprehensive text editor. Vim is a robust, highly configurable, cross-platform, and widely-used text editor that runs on Unix-like systems including Linux, OS X, Solaris, *BSD, and MS-Windows.

It is packed with features and highly extensible through various community-developed plugins, enabling you to enhance Vim beyond just a basic text editor using vim tricks and tips.

Vim Features

Some of its notable features include:

• A new Vim9 script aimed at boosting performance.
• Persistent, multi-level undo tree.
• Support for multiple screens.
• Highly extensible via multiple plugins.
• A powerful and reliable search tool for users.
• Compatibility with numerous programming languages and file formats.
• Integration with various tools and more.

After years of steady development, Vim has now taken a major leap forward with the release of Vim 9.0, bringing important improvements, several bug fixes, and new features as outlined in the official release announcement.

[ You might also like: 8 Interesting Vim Editor Tips and Tricks for Linux Users ]

How To Install Vim 9.0 Editor in Linux Systems

Most modern Linux distributions allow installation of the Vim editor from default repositories using the system's package manager, although the version available will likely be somewhat outdated.

<code>$ sudo apt install vim     [On Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint]
$ sudo dnf install vim     [On RHEL, CentOS and Fedora]
$ sudo pacman -S vim       [On Arch Linux and Manjaro]
$ sudo zypper install vim  [On OpenSuse]</code>

Though Vim 9.0 has been released, it may take some time before it reaches the official software repositories of various Linux distributions.

Fortunately, users of Ubuntu and Mint and their derivatives can install it using the unofficial and untrusted PPA as shown below:

<code>$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/vim
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install vim</code>

Once installed, you can launch vim from the terminal and check related information with the following command:

<code>$ vim</code>

To remove it and revert back to the older version found in the Ubuntu repository, execute the following commands to purge the PPA:

<code>$ sudo apt install ppa-purge
$ sudo ppa-purge ppa:jonathonf/vim</code>

Arch Linux users can install the latest version of Vim using the pacman command as follows:

<code># pacman -S vim</code>

Compiling Vim 9.0 from Sources in Linux

For other Linux distributions, it may be some time before the new version appears in official software repositories. However, you can try out the latest Vim 9.0 by compiling it yourself from source code as shown:

<code># git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git
# cd vim/src
# make
# make test
# make install
# vim</code>

There is also a Vim Appimage built daily that works across many Linux systems.

Finally, if you've installed Vim, give it a try and reach out to us via the feedback section below. Share your suggestions or experiences and more. We would love to hear valuable feedback from you.

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