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Vim 7.2 Released

Posted by kdawson on from the vigor-too dept.

sanguisdex writes "After fifteen months of work: a brand new Vim release! This is a stable version. There are many bug fixes and updated runtime files. The only new feature worth mentioning is support for floating point. Upgrading from a previous version is highly recommended: a few crashing bugs and several security issues were fixed. For the details see the announcement or go directly to the download page."

6 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. in addition to the new release... by yagu · · Score: 4, Informative

    O'Reilly released the latest new version of their vi book, (now "Learning the vi and Vim Editors") last summer with seven new chapters devoted to vim!

  2. Am I crazy? by liebeskind · · Score: 5, Informative

    Am I crazy - or has vim 7.2 been out for a while?
    The date on the announcement is from August 8, 2009.
    Also:
    ~$ vim --version
    VIM - Vi IMproved 7.2 (2008 Aug 9, compiled Nov 11 2008 17:20:43)

    1. Re:Am I crazy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Just click the link, the post dates from 9 Aug 2008

  3. Please... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I work daily with humongous text files. I have found no other editor that performs as well when you work with text files that are in several gigabytes range. All the other major shell text editors cough instantly (tried for instance Emacs, it loaded one of those files for 30 minutes before I got bored of waiting) and most of the shiny new GUI editors are even worse. For instance gedit practically dies instantly on the stuff I work with.

    There is a place for vi*. You use them when the tool has to work. They are pain in the ass to use, but they manage things others do not.

    1. Re:Please... by lewiscr · · Score: 3, Informative

      "sed" - could work, but why bother if vim works? Personally, I can never remember the sed syntax.

      *sputters* You can't remember the sed syntax? It's the same as vi.

      Mostly likely, if you're editting a several gig text file, you're doing bulk edits, not single edits. ala:

      :%s/hamburger/cheeseburger/g

      Well, here's the sed script to do that:

      sed 's/hamburger/cheeseburger/g' < infile > outfile

      They're so similiar, I suspect that they're related... yup. The Sed History says that "Sed was first written in 1977 as a stream adaptation of the ed editor".

      And since vi is just a fancy tui on top of ed, you already know sed.

      Why bother? Just because vi can edit large files, it's still painfully slow. Large and/or many edits are very slow to apply and undo. The same commands executed in sed can be done order of magnitude faster. I believe (but have never taken the time to prove it) that it's related to the undo buffer. And yes, my anecdotal evidence took place on machine with enough RAM that no swapping was required for vi or sed.

      Now if you want to get really productive, we can talk about taking your vi commands, wrapping them in a sed script, then running it through sed2perl. Oh the Thinks you will have Thunk.

  4. Note from a VIM user... by sd.fhasldff · · Score: 3, Informative

    come on now, it's a great editor for deleting things from files!

    Go to the character of interest, hit x. Go to the line of interest and hit dd.

    Of course, if you want to do more than delete, you are better off with notepad.

    I was very tempted to use my mod points to mod this TROLL, but I try staying far away from anything that even smells like "modding down stuff you disagree with", so I'll Feed the Troll, instead...

    How do I search-replace SMARTLY (i.e. with regexp) in Notepad?

    Does notepad support syntax highlighting?

    Does notepad support "jumping" to the last position when reopening a file?

    Does notepad support auto-indentation? Language-dependent auto-indentation?

    Does notepad support multiple buffers? (cut-n-paste)

    Does notepad support variable tabstops? Using spaces as tabs?

    Does notepad support collapsing/folding sections into a single line?

    These features are just a tiny fraction of what I use in VIM *every single day*. Notepad does none of these. I used to use emacs, because the insert, command and visual modes confused me. It really didn't take long to get used to, however, and I generally prefer VIM now (although I'm perfectly happy using emacs instead).

    I feel I should now come up with a car analogy, comparing VIM and Notepad, but the only word that comes to mind is Yugo. And that would be Notepad, in case you were wondering.