VIM 6.0 is Out

LinuxNews.pl writes "It's more then a year after releasing the first 6.0 alpha. Lot's of improvements (i.e. you can edit files via FTP!) - check them out on vim.org" Of course everyone knows that vim is the best text editor in the world. Anyone who tells you differently is either wrong, lying, or criminally insane. (Or an emacs user, in which case they are wrong, lying and criminally insane).

Comments

Favorite new feature

[gorgon]

My favorite new vim feature is :hardcopy. This feature lets you save to postscript (or print) versions of your file that look just like what's on the screen, including syntax highlighting. No more need to screw around with a2ps or enscript when you want to pretty-print code. Very nice. Thanks to Bram et al.

Re:Favorite new feature

[Dr. Sp0ng]

My favorite new vim feature is :hardcopy. This feature lets you save to postscript (or print) versions of your file that look just like what's on the screen, including syntax highlighting.

I hate to sound like every other poster on this board today :P, but emacs has been able to do this for awhile, and its postscript printouts look *sweet*. Better than vim 6's.

Before I get moderated down as off-topic, let me just say that vim 6 is badass... finally lets me use #RRGGBB values for syntax highlighting in the GUI. Whee. When the betas for 6 started appearing I spent a lot of time tweaking my .vimrc file, and now I can't even use anything else. I even use vim (with mutt) for email. It rocks.

One thing I haven't been able to figure out how to do is to auto-read and -write GPG encrypted files (I know it can't do it in a perfectly secure way, the unencrypted version may get swapped out to disk, but I don't care so much about that. If somebody gets ahold of my hard drive, whatever. My secrets aren't all that interesting anyway.) I found some .vimrc stuff to do this through google, but it didn't work (and I couldn't figure out why). Anybody know how to do this?

Re:what's the difference?

[garett_spencley]

The two editors evolved differently. Vim started as 100% compatible vi clone with extra features, while emacs was an attempt to create a 100% free (as in speech) text editor when the alternatives were vi (closed source commercial implementations), pico etc.

So in a nutshell here are the differences:

o Emacs uses lisp to completely customize the editor. Vim uses it's own little scripting language to do syntax highlighting, create shortcuts etc...

o Vim is just an editor. Emacs will do everything except pick your nose (ei: check e-mail, surf the net, even play games). You can also write Emacs extensions with emacs-lisp to get it to pick your nose if you really want it to.

o The interface is quite different. Vim (like vi) has editing mode and command mode. Emacs just has editing mode. Both are command-driven though unless you use gvim or XEmacs - in that case you get an X11 user interface.

There are lots of other differences feature wise but these are the big ones. The best suggestion I can give you is to just try both. They are both relatively hard to learn since you have to memorize a lot of commands. But once you have them down pat they easily become two of the best text editors available.

One thing to note though: because they are hard to learn it's suggested that you only pick them up if you do a LOT of text-editing (programmers for example). They really are programmers editors and not for people who just want to create the odd ascii file. Do not use them expecting something like notepad for windows. If you do you will hate them.

--
Garett

1984 Interview with Bill Joy

[Hobart]

This page has an interesting interview with Bill Joy, the original author of VI ...

Interesting tidbits

• Originally written in 1976, "...right after Carter got elected"
• Joy had, by 1984, dumped 'vi' for Interleaf for WYSIWYG
• Many interesting predictions about 'the future'

Re:CT's bias

[A Commentor]

Making the editor's comments appear as a comment would actually be a great idea...

It gives moderators the ability to mod them down, and ALSO, no one would be able to claim '1st post'.

Re:joe is better

[kvigor]

As a former joe fan, I must suggest you check out Jed.

Unlike joe, it is being actively developed and supported, has readable source (while I like joe, have you ever looked at the source? The medication is helping, but I still twitch occasionally...), runs on Windows (yeah, sometimes I have to work on a Windows box and it's really nice to be able to have my editor of choice), and has both console and X/Win32 GUI versions.

Unlike emacs, it's relatively small & fast (though admittedly bigger & slower than joe); unlike vi, it's useful.

If you like joe, you should check out jed.

Emacs is not an editor, really

[pclminion]

As always, the vi people misunderstand Emacs. Emacs does not aim to be an editor. It aims to be a cohesive environment. Perhaps this rubs the vi people the wrong way because, as we all know, UNIX is supposed to be based on small, powerful tools that perform one, and only one, function (or group of closely related functions).

Emacs violates that philosophy. And the vi users hate that. Ok, that's fine. But a philosophy cannot be right or wrong. Get over it already.

Emacs has strengths, particularly as a programming tool. Integrated (and fully customizable) debugging. Version control (perhaps vi does this as well). Hex-editing mode. Automated compilation. And anything else you can think of: if it there isn't a ELISP module out there to do it already, someone can hack it together quite quickly.

If you stop thinking of Emacs as an editor, and begin thinking of it as a more comprehensive environment, it stops seeming outrageous. vi may be the best editor out there. But Emacs is the best integrated solution for complex environments.

what do the "masters" use?

[Mr. Asdf]

Just curious if people happen to know which editor the "masters" use.

I think I heard Linus uses microemacs.
I would guess that Bjarne uses vi since his errata is in s/a/b/ format.

(ok, pick your own masters if you want....)