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Vim 6.3 Released

Posted by timothy on from the cursory-inspection dept.

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!"

16 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. congrats to Bram by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Vim is great. I used to use Emacs and vi equally: Emacs for programming and other important stuff, vi for editing config files. Then I discovered Vim, and have not used Emacs in a LONG time.

    The only thing I didn't like about Vim is the odd (to me) language you extend it with. But I just discovered you can use Ruby, Perl, etc., instead, so once I figure that out I bet I can get uninstall Emacs completely.

    And now I see on the site that Bram is accepting sponsorships.. considering how many $$ I make using Vim to do my work, I will gladly send him a few (hundred) euros for his trouble!

  2. finally! by Enrico+Pulatzo · · Score: 4, Informative

    I installed this last week and was quite happy to see that the p-bug in windows is now fixed! Basically, if you had text selected and started to type a letter p, a paste would ensue rather than typing the letter p.

    1. Re:finally! by Soul-Burn666 · · Score: 2, Informative

      And why shouldn't it paste?
      If you have text selected, you are in visual mode, not insert mode. I don't know if it should paste or not (tho that seems most reasonable), but just inserting the letter p into the text? What makes the letter p special, and not for example the letter "y" (to yank to selected text, one the obvious things you want to do with selected text).

      Either that or I completly don't understand what you mean by "started to type the letter p", I assume you meant pressing the p button.

      --
      ^_^
    2. Re:finally! by Enrico+Pulatzo · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm certain it's something that can be manipulated via the vimrc file. I'll even wager that the change is in the mswin.vim file that is sourced by default installs on Windows. That's what this thread leads me to believe. (See March 27, 2004 21:57 comment)

    3. Re:finally! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's across-the-board. The special mode that Vim goes into upon mouse selection is called "Select mode", indicated by "-- SELECT --" and is documented in the Vim manual accessible via :help.

      It is a distinct mode to the other Vim modes. It is close to, but different to vim's "Visual mode" entered with "v", used for selecting blocks of text.

      (And confusingly, the name "Visual mode" is used in the original Vi for what Vim calls "Normal mode": Vi has no Vim Visual Mode!)

      So the windows "p" behaviour was a bug.

  3. Just for the balance by ciaran_o_riordan · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    --
    Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
    1. Re:Just for the balance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Every time I've tried to force myself to use Emacs on a regular basis I go running back to Vim. It is Emacs non-sensical (too me at least) default key bindings that turn me off. I'm can handle ctrl-v to page down but ESC/meta-v to page up?!?!? Similarly, I don't want to have to remove my hand from the home row in order to hit PageUp/PageDown/Arrows to move about my buffer either.

      Viper mode doesn't help either because I'll never end up using any of Emacs more advanced features.

    2. Re:Just for the balance by ciaran_o_riordan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
    3. Re:Just for the balance by metamatic · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
    4. Re:Just for the balance by Feztaa · · Score: 2, Informative

      I think the secret to using emacs comfortably is to map your right alt key (admit it, you've never touched that key in all your life) to be the left control key.

      Now I scroll through documents by simply holding down my right alt key and pressing 'n', which is interpreted by Emacs as C-n, which puts you onto the next line of text. C-n is actually very easy to just hold down when it's your right alt key (assuming qwerty layout).

      I think it's actually kinda funny with vim using hjkl for movement and emacs using fbnp. f, b, n, and p are MUCH more logical (F for going Forward one character, B for Backward, N for Next line, P for Previous line), it's just that those keys happen to be scattered around the keyboard. Vim just picked wacky letters that have nothing to do with anything, except that they're right next to each other.

      I'm actually getting used to Emacs. At first I thought it was inefficient to have to press C-x C-s to save a file, then I realized that it was less keypresses than ESC :wq!. Same with C-x C-c to exit, etc. The pain of holding down two keys at once is easily compensated for by not having to switch modes. Modes in vim always screwed me up; even though I was used to vim commands after years of use, I still found myself trying to type text into command mode or typing commands into insert mode. My brain has been so damaged by vim's modes that you'll often see me typing vim commands into Emacs, it's really embarrassing. "Ok, I want to edit this, press i, oops, delete the i and type what I really wanted..."

  4. It Must Be My Warped Mind... by Steinfiend · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Happy Vimming!"

    Am I the only one who thinks this sounds insanely dirty?!

  5. [2004-06-08] by vijaya_chandra · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. And the Ruby VIM syntax/indent files... by tcopeland · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...are available here.

    To close, let me just say this.... :wq.

    --
    The Army reading list
  7. Vim or Emacs by ufnoise · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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.

  8. Oh, just great! by Feztaa · · Score: 2, Funny

    I sure picked a great time to switch to Emacs.

    Oh well, at least I'm enjoying Emacs ;)

  9. Re:A Haretic's Confession by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative
    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).

    Sure, those keybindings are the default when you install Vim on Windows. They're contained in a script called mswin.vim that is automatically run in each session. I'm sure you could even use the keybindings on a *nix box, if you're so inclined.