Vim stands for Vi IMproved and it is undoubtly one of the most powerfull text editors created. As the name implies it is an improved version of Unix program 'Vi'. The first version (v1.14) of Vim was released in november 1991. After that it has been under constant development, and it has now reached version 6.2. Vim has from the very beginning been an open source project, so it available on most platforms you can think of.
Vim is setup in such a way that everything can be done from the keyboard, so when editing a file you don't need to move your hands away from the keyboard nor your eyes off the monitor. The keyboard setup of Vim is also optimized for touch typing, so you fingers never stray far away from the Home Row when you're working. Another great thing about Vim is that it is very customizeable. Anything that you can think of is possible to do, and once you've written a function for it you can easily assign it to a custom key combination for easy reuse.
The downside of all these fantastic functions is that Vim takes a little bit of extra effort to learn. Unlike Notepad you can't open up Vim and start using it at once, a little bit of extra effort is neeed. That is one of the reasons that I've decided to dedicate part of my website to Vim; to make user's first steps into Vim a little bit easier. Most people haven't heard of Vim either, so hopefully this section will make a couple of more people take up Vim and discover how good it actually is.
But there is one thing about Vim that I don't like. Since the shortcuts are as optimized as they are it is very hard to use Vim in combination with the Dvorak keyboard layout. I've thought about switching to the Dvorak keyboard layout a lot of times, but one of the main reasons that I still stick with the QWERTY layout is that Vim and Dvorak don't go well together. I know of people who use the Dvorak layout with Vim, so it is possible if you're willing to use a lot of time and reconfigure much of Vim's shortcuts. You only need to reconfigure a couple of shortcuts to get the basic functionality back, but to get the full functionality back I'm afraid a lot of customizing is needed.
Emacs is the only text editor that I can think of that stands a chance compared to Vim. There is a lot of other text editors out there; Nano, Pico and Notepad just to name a few. The reason that Emacs and Vim stand out from the crowd is that the functionality that they offer is superior to the other editors. Both of these text editors have also existed for a long time, so the communities built around them are huge resulting in a vast amount of plugins and other add-ons. They also come with support for most programming languages known to mankind so no matter what programming language you're using you can have syntax highlighting. Both of them are also designed with keyboard users in mind, so everything can easily be accessed through keyboard shortcuts.
So, why is Vim better than Emacs? That is a question that has caused numerous flame wars on both news groups and forums. Both of the programs have strong supporters and there is no definive answer to which of them is best. There are a couple of reason to why I prefere Vim. The most important one is probably that all keyboard shortcuts in Emacs are accesed with either CTRL or ALT - except F(1-12) are the same. In Vim keyboard shortcuts are placed at normal characters, like 'd' for delete, as well as combinations including CTRL and ALT. Reason for this difference is that Emacs only has one mode, so normal characters will always be inserted into the document by Emacs. While in Vim normal characters will only be inserted into the text if you're in Insert mode. I feel that this makes for faster editing once you get used to switching between the different modes of Vim.
Another reason that I use Vim is that I learnt Vim before I tried Emacs. so I was allready used to the Vim features when I tried Emacs, which probably made Emacs seem more unatural than Vim. If I had tried Emacs first the story might have been different.