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Vim 8.0 Released! (google.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader MrKaos writes: The venerable and essential vim has had it's first major release in 10 years. Lots of new and interesting features including, vim script improvements, JSON support, messages exchange with background processes, a test framework and a bunch of Windows DirectX compatibility improvements. A package manager has been added to handle the ever-growing plug-in library, start-up changes and support for a lot of old platforms has been dropped. Many Vimprovements!
Emacs releases an upgrade and vi has to do the same. Ooh.
Vim != Vi
Pedantic? Yes, but there is a difference. Vim is a lot more capable (though I'm still primarily an (X)Emacs user, which is even more capable.)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It's my understanding that Mr. Munroe worked for NASA on a contract basis only. The only reason that stopped was because NASA eventually ran out of money to rehire him for another contract, not because he couldn't "cut it", or because they were dissatisfied with his work.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
* You can't bind different operations to TAB and Ctrl-I because Vim thinks they are the same.
That's because they are the same. I is 0x49, ASCII-wise, Control masks the 6th bit, giving you 0x09 for Control-I, which happens to be HT (horizontal tab).
* Can't bind Ctrl-1 through Ctrl-9
That's because there are no corresponding control characters. You have Control-@ through Control-_ and the 30 others inbetween.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
"MS-Windows DirectX support" Wait, what?
Vim 8.0 supports DirectWrite, which is fully hardware-accelerated a replacement for GDI, the original MS Windows text & 2D drawing API. It allows for things like caching fonts in the graphics card so it can render more quickly, and perform anti-aliasing (including ClearType) in hardware.
Now you might think, ehhh, computers are so fast these days, how much can that really matter? Given that we've gradually moving to much higher pixel density (e.g. I'm typing this on a large 4k monitor with about 250% scaling), we're expecting the text drawer to drive 4x-8x as many pixels, which requires a ton more effort. Doesn't matter that it's "console".... something has to turn Unicode code points into pixels, right? Microsoft's efforts and optimizations in text rending are all in the DirectWrite API these days, so it only makes sense for every text-based application to use it.