Advantages (or downsides) of GVim over Vim to edit code

Question

Should I install vim or GVim ?

I develop mainly Ruby on Rails (I also use IDE's, but different topic).

Are there any differences or advantage of using Gvim vs vim ?

Answer 1

In gVim you can select the font, vim depends on the font the terminal provides. And it's the same for colour support. Gvim has full support, vim depends on the terminal.

Gvim additionally has menus and a toolbar, which vim lacks.

Answer 2

Install both and try them both, they use the same configuration etc. so there's no risk.

As far as differences are concerned: one is a graphical tool one is a command line tool. So the advantage of vim to gvim is that you can use it easily over an ssh connection. (You can do the same with gvim by tunneling X but that has quite some overhead.

Answer 3

They both are the same if you see performance wise but if you want good looks and want to customize the editor so that it does not look boring then you would like to try the enhanced version of vim.

Answer 4

gvim package shall have all vim coming along. Meaning, if you wish to fall back to vanilla vim you can.

Anyway, the biggest difference IMO is that vim depends on the terminal to handle special characters and key-sequences. If you wish to map and exploit things like <c-space>, <m-ins>, ... just forget about it with vim.

Of course gvim has menus, mouse, toolbar, etc. But that's just a small bonus compared to a fully functional keyboard.