Better GUI for vim?

vim is designed for using the keyboard efficiently, not for using the mouse. thus, i find your complaint about a bad "gui" a bit awkward. if you do not like vim or if you do not want to learn how things are done in vim, thats just fine. but then you have to use another editor because vim just does not match your requirements.

so, i doubt there will be any gui-version of vim that matches your expectations of what a decent "graphical" editor should look like or should behave.

I agree with Akira's answers and comments.

The only conventions-friendly GUI for Vim is MacVim which, obviously, is a Mac-only application.

I'm not sure it's "the best of both worlds", but the latest beta of Sublime Text 2 has a very impressive "vintage" mode that covers a lot of useful Vim features (motions, text-objects) and maps other things (/ or ? for example) to its native features. I find its overall design a bit irritating so I don't see myself switching to it anytime soon but, again, the vintage mode is impressive.

You can use VisualStudio Code and it has several plugins that add many of Vim's functionalities alongside with many goodies. It is a very good editor besides it is open and free and it has Windows, MacOs and Linux flavors.

You can get a plugin for an IDE which gives it VIM keybindings. E.G.

• Netbeans: http://sourceforge.net/projects/viex/ PHP Storm / WEB
• Storm: http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?webide&id=164

Here's a very cool web IDE for web developers, includes git, which has VIM keybinding mode built in:

• Cloud 9: http://c9.io/

Otherwise, I do my development on a mac, and I'm a huge fan of MacVim, and I agree that gVim is super ugly on *nix, and I cringe whenever I have to run vim in an ssh shell on the server.

As far as VIM like editors which aren't a separate IDE, another (mac only, sorry) GUI app is:

• Vico: http://www.vicoapp.com/

Vim is intended to be used without GUI. But if you are concerned about the menu bar and tool bar in gvim that looks out of place. You can disable it just insert

"Remove Menubar and Toolbar
set guioptions -=m 
set guioptions -=T

into your vimrc then it will be gone. on the bonus if your using windows lower than 10 your gvim resized better ( than default windows cmd ) and has better color scheme support and looks good.