"Note that this is an article explicitly for beginners new to Vim. If you've been using Vim for a while, all of this should look entirely familiar--and you might wonder why some topics aren't covered. Patience. We'll get to everything in due time, but there's a lot to cover!
"What's Vim, and Why Do I Want It?
"Vim is the editor of choice for many developers and power users. It's a "modal" text editor based on the vi editor written by Bill Joy in the 1970s for a version of UNIX. It inherits the key bindings of vi, but also adds a great deal of functionality and extensibility that are missing from the original vi.
"What the heck do we mean by modal? When you're using most word processors and text editors, the alphanumeric keys (i.e., a through z, 1 through 9) are only used to input those characters unless they're modified by a control key. In Vim, the mode that the editor is in determines whether the alphanumeric keys will input those characters or move the cursor through the document."
