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posted by martyb on Saturday December 14 2019, @02:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the real-programmers-edit-files-using-cat-and-sed dept.

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 released : vim online

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Saturday December 14 2019, @03:14PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 14 2019, @03:14PM (#932051)

    Its STILL kinda like that in that emacs has enough nifty addons for IDE/project oriented operations, that just flying off an editing a random line in a random file for 10 seconds is going to be much quicker in vim, but if you are going to be working on a dedicated project for an entire afternoon the higher efficiency of emacs will overall win. So like it or not I "have to" switch back and forth depending on what I'm doing.

    So if I'm deep in project #3 using projectile in emacs, the context switch to changing one line in project #7 for 10 seconds is just too high, fling up a vim for that 10 second task and back to "real work" on emacs.

    Even stranger using sublime text editor for some obscure microcontroller stuff like micropython. Most dedicated microcontroller IDE software is ridiculously weak like using desktop dev IDEs from the 90s, in 2020. STM32 has like a dozen competing IDEs, which is hilarious, although CubeIDE is pretty good. Confusingly its almost, but not quite, eclipse plus the stm32 eclipse plugin, but thats not entirely wrong. Still most microcontroller IDEs are more like the dreaded arduino IDE which unfortunately combines the lack of behind the scenes transparency of an IDE with the rich featureset of MS notepad.

    If someone in the 90s told me we'd all pretty much be using one webbrowser yet still be actively using at least a dozen incompatible different text/code editors, I'd have thought they were kidding...

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  • (Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday December 14 2019, @03:33PM

    by coolgopher (1157) on Saturday December 14 2019, @03:33PM (#932057)

    like the dreaded arduino IDE which unfortunately combines the lack of behind the scenes transparency of an IDE with the rich featureset of MS notepad.

    Ahahahahahahahahaha!

    ...

    You're not wrong.