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After more than a year of development the new features are now ready for the Vim crowds. Popup windows make it possible to show messages, function prototypes, code snippets and anything else on top of the text being edited. They open and close quickly and can be highlighted in many ways. More about that in the article.
Vim 8.2 is available! Vim 8.2 is a minor release, a lot of bugs have been fixed, documentation was updated, test coverage was improved, etc. There are a few interesting new features, see below.
For MS-Windows, download the self installing executable.
Signed MS-Windows files will soon be available on the vim-win32-installer site
For Unix you probably want to get the latest version using git, see the github page
Otherwise see the Download page for options.Background:
Before I did the keynote at VimConf 2018 I asked plugin developers what they wanted from Vim. The result was a very long list of requested features. The top two items were clear: Popup windows and text properties.
After more than a year of development the new features are now ready for the Vim crowds. Popup windows make it possible to show messages, function prototypes, code snippets and anything else on top of the text being edited. They open and close quickly and can be highlighted in many ways. More about that below.
This was no small effort. Although the existing window support could be used, popup windows are different enough to require a lot of extra logic. Especially to update the screen efficiently. Also to make it easy for plugin writers to use them; you don't need to tell Vim exactly where to show one, just give a reference point and the text to display, Vim will figure out the size and where the popup fits best.
Text properties can be used for something as simple as highlighting a text snippet or something as complicated as using an external parser to locate syntax items and highlight them asynchronously. This can be used instead of the pattern based syntax highlighting. A text property sticks with the text, also when inserting a word before it. And this is done efficiently by storing the properties with the text.
There's much more at the above link.
(Score: 5, Touché) by darkfeline on Saturday December 14 2019, @05:16AM (4 children)
Popup windows and text properties, features that Emacs has had for years. Maybe in a few more years Vim will finally be a poor implementation of Emacs, not unlike how all other languages become a poor implementation of Lisp.
I say this as someone who uses Emacs, vi, and ed. I don't see what use case Vim is trying to fill, other than vi users pretending that they don't want the extensibility of Emacs.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 14 2019, @01:23PM
I actively avoid vim these days, thankfully there's a bunch of nice vi implementations available. Text editing should change course in my opinion - back to the unix philosophy. Split up all those different components, and you won't need to invent new languages to let users make extensions because it will be trivial using whatever language they want.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday December 14 2019, @03:04PM (2 children)
vi is kinda dead to active development, whereas vim actually adds stuff.
WRT features vim seems to top down add features that users want and the bottom will take care of itself. So people want "TRAMP mode" from emacs for vim, OK. So they want auto-line ending correction, OK.
Meanwhile emacs seems to be bottom up, so we got a pretty good LISP with good text handing ability, now what nifty features can we build on top of that, and the top will take care of itself WRT end users will use what they like. So its technically possible to write in LISP a translator for file saving and loading that'll work over SSH/SCP and FTP... OK TRAMP mode is born and if the users like it, they'll use it, or if not, well, who cares emacs lisp is really cool anyway.
So emacs is likely to innovate the coolest things whereas vim is most likely to implement the features discovered to be coolest. Kinda unix vs windows, in a way. Everything ever added to vim, has emacs users going "yeah I had that back in '91 nice they finally caught up to the civilized world".
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Wednesday December 18 2019, @03:11AM (1 child)
Vim screws you over when you think you're starting vi to edit a simple file and you try to paste text. Each line gets indented more than the next and if any line starts with a comment, vim decides you meant to comment all the remaining lines.
And it has great color schemes to prevent you from accidentally reading the file you've opened.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday December 19 2019, @08:06PM
There are mystical incantations in my .vimrc that fix those problems but I'm not sure which lines do it.