Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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!

12 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 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.
  2. 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?

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

    https://xkcd.com/378/

    1. 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".

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

    "MS-Windows DirectX support"
    Wait, what?

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

  5. 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!
  6. 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!