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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!

6 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 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. 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.