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Vim 8.0 Released! (google.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the speaking-of-text-editors dept.

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!

30 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Rivalry by colinrichardday · · Score: 5, Funny

    Emacs releases an upgrade and vi has to do the same. Ooh.

    1. Re:Rivalry by plover · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's a conspiracy, I tells ya. They put GPS and tracking in it.

      Of course, emacs has had GPS support for 15 years now...

      --
      John
    2. Re:Rivalry by Fwipp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Vim's 8.0 release was actually September 12th. Emacs 25.1 came out yesterday, September 17th.

      Slashdot is just incredibly slow. :)

    3. Re:Rivalry by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 3, Informative

      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. . . .
    4. Re:Rivalry by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      They post the Emacs' story first though. That should tell you something about the biases of the Slashdot editors. Or maybe they just couldn't get the new version of Vim running on the older Emacs OS.

    5. Re:Rivalry by colinrichardday · · Score: 2

      Fair enough, but I take VI improved to be GNU Emacs. People, start your flamethrowers!

    6. Re:Rivalry by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 3, Funny

      Pretty sure they run vim in emacs.

    7. Re:Rivalry by jittles · · Score: 2

      Vim's 8.0 release was actually September 12th. Emacs 25.1 came out yesterday, September 17th.

      Slashdot is just incredibly slow. :)

      Either that or they were just delaying the story to start a holy war.

    8. Re:Rivalry by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      It's like the two-party system. Did you seriously believe they were working against each other? ;)

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    9. Re:Rivalry by sconeu · · Score: 5, Funny

      That makes sense. Emacs is a great OS, just needs a good editor. Vim fills that need.

      --
      General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
    10. Re:Rivalry by garyebickford · · Score: 2

      Someone should fork both, and name the Vim fork Kang, and the Emacs fork Kodos.

      --
      It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
    11. Re:Rivalry by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 2

      You're a tranny. Gross.

      And what's so gross about being a transsexual? Come on, confront your fears, put it out there, you'll feel better (and if not, seek professional help).

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  2. No way by MichaelSmith · · Score: 2

    Npt using it if it can't play youtube videos.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  3. WTF??! by Trailer+Trash · · Score: 2

    23 comments on Emacs and 4 on Vim?

    --
    Do you have ESP?
    1. Re:WTF??! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Emacs users have more time for commenting on slashdot.
      What else are they going to do while waiting for Emacs to load?

  4. Relevant xkcd by johnsmithperson123 · · Score: 4, Funny

    https://xkcd.com/378/

    1. Re:Relevant xkcd by mark-t · · Score: 3, Informative

      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'
    2. Re:Relevant xkcd by No+Longer+an+AC · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This just oozes "stop-liking-what-I-don't-like".

      So you don't like xkcd? Fine. It's easy enough to ignore.

      There are plenty of popular forms of humor that don't amuse me much but I would get no satisfaction from going into threads and telling people that whatever they enjoyed was actually crap. They wouldn't be convinced anyway. They think I was a troll or a fool.

      I don't think The Onion is funny, I grew bored with Seinfeld in the '90s and now I can't stand him, I like Monty Python, but how many times do we have to see a reference to it in a thread before it gets old? It's not dead yet, it's just pining for the fjords, right?

      There is some humor that I like that a lot of people don't find funny either. There's no point in me trying to convince them that it's funny - or in the case of some xkcd comics explain it to them.

      Imagine explaining the linked xkcd strip to someone whose only technical knowledge involved Facebook and Snapchat. Even if you can explain it to them at best their response will be "Meh".

  5. New feature by BlackPignouf · · Score: 5, Funny

    "MS-Windows DirectX support"
    Wait, what?

    1. Re:New feature by JustNiz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As a crusty old developer myself, it seems clear that "clean/simple/partitioned" are no longer in fashion, and most younger developers not only don't see anything wrong with pulling every fucking package dependency they can into everything, they feel it somehow makes them look smarter or something.

    2. Re:New feature by hey! · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As a crusty old, old programmer myself, often it's the old eyeballs that let me down. My brain is willing to keep working by the eyestrain tells me I have to take a break.

      So better rendering is a good thing, unless it's an attempt at rendering that makes things pretty but harder to read.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    3. Re:New feature by JustNiz · · Score: 2

      Why VIM doing rendering at all? and better yet, platform-specific rendering?

    4. Re:New feature by Daltorak · · Score: 5, Informative

      "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.

    5. Re:New feature by tlhIngan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Why VIM doing rendering at all? and better yet, platform-specific rendering?

      In text mode, no, there's no rendering going on. But in graphical mode, you have to translate the characters to pixels, and that's not a trivial task anymore. Add in scrolling and other tasks you do with blocks of text, and you're pushing serious pixels. Especially if you operate in a high resolution mode (4K monitors aren't hard to find these days).

      DirectWrite is a GPU-optimized font renderer for Windows - it loads the fonts into the GPU memory, and then the font rendering programs, plus text effects like ClearType. You then send it the characters and the GPU renders it down, like it did in text mode, but without the blocky pixellated look. Given how many pixels it has to push these days, it's a task a GPU is much better suited for, and it makes scrolling and displaying large windows text all that much faster and with lowered CPU load.

      GDI allows a lot of nifty tricks, but 99% of the time, no one uses all those tricks - they just want to spit text onto the screen. So Microsoft created a GPU optimized way to accelerate the common task.

  6. I'm so excited... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2

    Emacs and VIM got updates. I'm waiting for Microsoft to update Edit.

  7. Re:Grammar note by fisted · · Score: 4, Funny

    Its been a pleasure reading your comment and from now on, I'll use your heuristic.
    Thanks!

    --
    CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
  8. Re:And yet still can't tell TAB from Ctrl-I ... :- by fisted · · Score: 4, Informative

    * 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!
  9. Re:Grammar note by NormalVisual · · Score: 2

    Also, you don't ever say "hi's", or "her's" when using those possessives. "Its" follows the same logic.

    --
    Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
  10. Re:Funny by argumentsockpuppet · · Score: 2

    I'm not an emacs user, but it's not because I have anything against emacs, it's because vi is already on everything.

    I started out using vi because it was installed. Most of the production systems I've been charged with handling don't have emacs, but they do have vi. If I'm lucky they have vim. I can usually push and manage to get something installed, but typically I don't want to do that. Typically I just want to work on whatever needs changed or fixed.

    What I look for in a text editor: Is it installed? Can I do what I need to do with it?

    That's about it.

  11. Re:And yet still can't tell TAB from Ctrl-I ... :- by tbttfox · · Score: 2

    Maybe give Neovim a look then.