Why Vim Still Beats Modern Editors in Speed and Memory Usage

Vim is a famous, highly customizable text editor derived from Vi, enhanced with many features and released as free software.

It is widely praised as the best Vi‑like editor, often rivaled only by Emacs; in 1999 Emacs won a LinuxWorld award, but Vim later earned the Slashdot Beanie for best open‑source editor.

The author uses Vim as the default editor because it edits small files instantly on a multi‑core machine without delay.

Some other facts about Vim:

It is highly extensible.

It can easily drop into a shell.

It is almost always available by default on Unix‑like systems, even on remote servers.

Below is a simple C program used in the benchmarks:

#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
    printf("Hello, world!");
}

How does Vim handle large files?

Opening a 6 MiB XML file consumes about 12 MiB of RAM in Vim, comparable to Nano, while VS Code uses 392 MiB and Atom up to 845 MiB.

Memory usage for opening a ~60‑byte C source file:

Vim requires only about 5 MiB, whereas Code needs 349 MiB and Atom 256 MiB; Nano uses less than 1 MiB.

Opening the same 6 MiB XML file takes roughly 4 seconds in Vim, about 20 seconds in VS Code and Atom, and only 1 second in Sublime.

In a test replacing 100,000 words in the same XML file, Nano and Atom failed, VS Code took about 80 seconds, Sublime 6 seconds, and Vim only 4 seconds.

Conclusion

Learn Vim. A great resource is vimcasts.org , which offers beginner tutorials, tips, and tricks from Drew Neil, who also authored an excellent Vim book.