Vim 6.3 Released

file cabinet (Bram Moolenaar) writes "It has been a year since version 6.2. During that year many bugs were fixed and a few new features added. The support for multiple languages has been improved. It is now possible to use translated help files. A lot of testing has been done and all reported problems have been solved. This is the most stable Vim release ever! Release notes can be found in the announcement. Or do ":help version-6.3" after installing. Happy Vimming!"

Comments

Just for the balance

[ciaran_o_riordan]

I had the opposite experience. Two years later I'm still finding new functionality in GNU Emacs.

Re:Just for the balance

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Learning new things does take a certain amount of effort. Emacs drove me mad for two whole days as I didn't know how to perform even basic tasks, but it was worth the effort though. (an additional two weeks was required to become properly comfortable).

notepad -> ViM -> Emacs.

I clung to ViM longer than I should have because I had learned it and I didn't want to discard that knowledge. I suspect many people are the same. Learning ViM (all those years ago) was such a pain, who'd want to throw out that effort? Do it. Emacs is much more useful.

Typing Alt-v isn't such a big deal. Emacs has almost 30 years of development put into it, it's a great editor.

Re:Just for the balance

[metamatic]

I switched from emacs to vi, then to vim, and I've never looked back. Vim is much more ergonomic and easier to master than emacs.

Re:Just for the balance

[Anonymous Coward]

Emacs may be more expressive and come with a lot more baggage, but I fail to see how any of that is "much more useful" than the modern features and capabilities matched by Vim. Maybe you never learned those features.

Not "vi", not "Vi", and not "ViM", but Vim. The editor.

So here's my theory (one I see a lot of): You learned Vim on your own, hacking config files and the like. But you only mastered only the basic things picked up mostly by accident or from some really bad web tutorial. But then you got a new job in an all-Emacs house, where everyone's been cutting code in Emacs for decades (even some Elisp code for special company things, like source checkouts and diffs), and for two weeks they indoctrinate you about all the fancy whiz-bang features in Emacs that aren't in "/bin/vi" (as opposed to /usr/local/bin/vim, or wherever), and they go on to malign "/bin/vi" and you pick it up too, all the while remaining ignorant to the true power of the greatest editor ever. Years later you end up on slashdot posting misguided and wrong propaganda, as you spread the mistaken notion that Emacs is somehow "much more useful" than "ViM".

You're a tool of the vast Emacs conspiracy. One day, a truly gifted hacker fluent in Vim will destroy you and your kind.

Make your time.

[2004-06-08]

[vijaya_chandra]

It has been a year since version 6.2.
It has been almost 2 weeks since 6.3 was released and we get an entry in Announcements on /. now :)

vim, for the quick editor it is, doesn't deserve this delay.

If you check the wishlist for 7.0 you would be surprised to observe that support for embedding vim in another gui program is right up in the top slots with *none* voting against it.

It's good to see people actually agreeing upon something good

Did you know that 'vim' is a household name in India and its sales amount to more than Rs. 2500 millions!?! That vim here is a dishwashing bar to help ppl get away from "KitchenSink" faster is a different matter.

Vim or Emacs

[ufnoise]

A few years ago, 1999. I had the choice of learning emacs or vim. Unfortunately, the computers I had made emacs seem slow and cumbersome, whereas gvim and vim felt much faster. Now I have a faster computer which makes the latency between the two softwares feel about the same. Unfortunately, I love vim too much to let it go and about the only thing I know in emacs is control-c control-x.

I come from the school of thought that a piece of software should do one thing well, and vim fit the bill. It let me edit programs fast. When I was dialing up over modem, vim seemed fast. In recent years I was somewhat annoyed by the incremental search with automatic highlighting being on by default, but I feel overall that my experience with vim has been an extremely productive one.

Setting up options with vim is very easy, where it seems that you have to carry around a configuration file every where you go to get the emacs you are used to.

A Haretic's Confession

[Anonymous Coward]

I must admit that I am addicted to windows-style shortcuts in text editors (shift + arrows to select, ctrl+c to copy, ctrl-v to paste, ctrl + arrows to skip a word, ctrl + shift + arrows to select while skipping, home to go to the beginning of the line (to the first letter after the whitespace at first, then to the beginning of the line), end to go to the end of the line, shift+home to select to the beginning, shift + end to select to the end).

Does someone please know of some module for Vim and/or Emacs that makes use of these shortcuts? I am too retarded to learn the two editing modes of Vim or to learn the Emacs-specific shortcuts, then write an extension module for my "favourite" shortcuts.

That is, because I participated in the writing of a text editor (in fact, we took some public domain component as a basis). Then I started an editor from scratch (in C++), and have many things (an AVL Tree used as a random-access array) for the document, a line structure that uses a linked list of small chunks of chars with a gap in the middle, even a java highlighter. But I do not have the time to work on this (work at the company, the university, etc.). So it would be nice to find some module for Emacs that turns it into something am I already quite familiar with, any help would be appreciated! :) Besides, the world hardly needs Yet Another Text Editor :)