ICommander uses the powerful Vim Editor in a read-only mode for viewing and
searching reports. It is used when you elect to View a report when it is
created instead of spooling or printing. It is also available in the ICommander
Print Utility for exploring report files available. Exploring archived reports
also uses Vim as does the View option for Free-Form Data Extraction output.
Why Vim? It is FAST and flexible. Searches in reports of several hundred pages are almost instantaneous. Searching for multiple occurrences going either up or down is very fast and Vim lets you know when it has hit the top or bottom of the report and will then automatically cycle back to the other.
A simple command will jump to the end of a report immediately. Many users take advantage of this to get to relevant totals that they know are at the end of a report. Then they may do a print screen to get the information they need instead of printing the entire report. Since we encourage ICommander users to automatically archive all posting registers and other significant reports, this contributes to the Paperless Office Concept as the full report is always available from the Archives via the ICommander General Utilities whenever needed. It may be explored again with Vim in the Archives or may be copied back into the ICommander Print Utility for printing all or selected pages.
The search and/or the ability to jump to the beginning or end of a report with Vim is also very useful when you are only interested in a few pages out of potentially hundreds in the entire report. Note the page number where the relevant information starts and ends. Then exit back to the ICommander Print Utility and print just that range of pages.
If you have created and explored a report that is not automatically archived and are not sure whether you will need to print all or other sections at some point, you can elect to archive the report from within the ICommander Print Utility. If it HAS been automatically archived, ICommander will let you know that in addition to a flag on the screen that indicates it has been.
Vim has been around from the earliest version of Unix. The original versions of it were called vi (for VIsual Editor) as in the early days of computing it was unusual to have a visual vs line editor. The Vim name comes from vi improved. Hundreds of people around the world have contributed to its development and it has successfully moved forward adapting to the current graphical world and works on about every type of computer available these days.
ICommander uses Vim in many different ways and one of its many strengths is the
ability to vary its characteristics depending on how it is being used. Once you
get used to it, use of other editors and word processing programs is very
frustrating due to the lack of tools and inefficiencies. Various ICommander
staff install the Microsoft Windows version of Vim on their PC in order to have
it available versus other tools. The primary ICommander developer uses Vim for
most correspondence by quickly creating the text in Vim and then copying it into
a word processor and doing some formatting there.