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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: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday December 14 2019, @02:52PM (1 child)
Well, different strokes for different folks, and I'm sure some people like it, and YOUR color scheme is likely stylish and tasteful, but my .vimrc has line like
to try and kill syntax color highlighting because OTHER people's syntax color schemes are insane.
Whomever decided git commit messages should be syntax highlighted to the palest possible yellow on blinding white background committed a crime against humanity on the level of systemd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 15 2019, @01:02AM
Yes!!! A thousand times, this!
At work, a new guy took over most of the puppet duties, and decided to push out colorizing that only could be read on a black background. I had written all of our old rules, and the default was syntax off, dir colorizing off etc. because it is a sensible default that will be readable for everyone. We had a talk.