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Announcements Programming Software IT Technology

Vim 6.3 Released 53

Posted by timothy from the cursory-inspection dept.
file cabinet (Bram Moolenaar) writes "It has been a year since version 6.2. During that year many bugs were fixed and a few new features added. The support for multiple languages has been improved. It is now possible to use translated help files. A lot of testing has been done and all reported problems have been solved. This is the most stable Vim release ever! Release notes can be found in the announcement. Or do ":help version-6.3" after installing. Happy Vimming!"
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Vim 6.3 Released More

Vim 6.3 Released

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  • congrats to Bram (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 20, 2004 @04:54PM (#9479226)

    Vim is great. I used to use Emacs and vi equally: Emacs for programming and other important stuff, vi for editing config files. Then I discovered Vim, and have not used Emacs in a LONG time.

    The only thing I didn't like about Vim is the odd (to me) language you extend it with. But I just discovered you can use Ruby, Perl, etc., instead, so once I figure that out I bet I can get uninstall Emacs completely.

    And now I see on the site that Bram is accepting sponsorships.. considering how many $$ I make using Vim to do my work, I will gladly send him a few (hundred) euros for his trouble!

    • Just for the balance (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ciaran_o_riordan ( 662132 ) on Sunday June 20, 2004 @05:10PM (#9479318) Homepage
      I had the opposite experience [compsoc.com]. Two years later I'm still finding new functionality in GNU Emacs.

      • Re:Just for the balance (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 20, 2004 @06:57PM (#9479835)
        Every time I've tried to force myself to use Emacs on a regular basis I go running back to Vim. It is Emacs non-sensical (too me at least) default key bindings that turn me off. I'm can handle ctrl-v to page down but ESC/meta-v to page up?!?!? Similarly, I don't want to have to remove my hand from the home row in order to hit PageUp/PageDown/Arrows to move about my buffer either.

        Viper mode doesn't help either because I'll never end up using any of Emacs more advanced features.

        • Re:Just for the balance (Score:5, Interesting)

          by ciaran_o_riordan ( 662132 ) on Sunday June 20, 2004 @07:38PM (#9479993) Homepage
          Learning new things does take a certain amount of effort. Emacs drove me mad for two whole days as I didn't know how to perform even basic tasks, but it was worth the effort though. (an additional two weeks was required to become properly comfortable).

          notepad -> ViM -> Emacs.

          I clung to ViM longer than I should have because I had learned it and I didn't want to discard that knowledge. I suspect many people are the same. Learning ViM (all those years ago) was such a pain, who'd want to throw out that effort? Do it. Emacs is much more useful.

          Typing Alt-v isn't such a big deal. Emacs has almost 30 years of development put into it, it's a great editor.
          • I switched from emacs to vi, then to vim, and I've never looked back. Vim is much more ergonomic and easier to master than emacs.

          • Re:Just for the balance (Score:1, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Emacs may be more expressive and come with a lot more baggage, but I fail to see how any of that is "much more useful" than the modern features and capabilities matched by Vim. Maybe you never learned those features.

            Not "vi", not "Vi", and not "ViM", but Vim. The editor.

            So here's my theory (one I see a lot of): You learned Vim on your own, hacking config files and the like. But you only mastered only the basic things picked up mostly by accident or from some really bad web tutorial. But then you got a new

        • Re:Just for the balance (Score:3, Informative)

          by Feztaa ( 633745 )
          I think the secret to using emacs comfortably is to map your right alt key (admit it, you've never touched that key in all your life) to be the left control key.

          Now I scroll through documents by simply holding down my right alt key and pressing 'n', which is interpreted by Emacs as C-n, which puts you onto the next line of text. C-n is actually very easy to just hold down when it's your right alt key (assuming qwerty layout).

          I think it's actually kinda funny with vim using hjkl for movement and emacs usin
          • I'm actually getting used to Emacs. At first I thought it was inefficient to have to press C-x C-s to save a file, then I realized that it was less keypresses than ESC :wq!.

            Use :x then.. :)

          • At first I thought it was inefficient to have to press C-x C-s to save a file, then I realized that it was less keypresses than ESC :wq!.

            Well, you're more than welcome to map C-x C-s (in any mode) to be ":wq!". Or you chould type "Shift-Z Shift-Z", if doing keymapping is too troublesome.

            Personally, I like that it's more than three keystrokes to save. Having to type "ESC :wq (or :q!)" (especially the last two) requires more thought (do I *really* want to save/exit this document?) than C-x C-c. I guess it
          • I think the secret to using emacs comfortably is to map your right alt key (admit it, you've never touched that key in all your life) to be the left control key.

            Ehh, maybe for you with us layout. I use it all the time (swedish layout) as some, albeit not so commonly used chars are bound to it. Most used are probably @ (right alt-2) and $ (right alt-3). I got those bound to capslock ($ without shift and @ with shift) as it's just a pain in the **s to code perl without it.. but they are used.

            And just for
          • > Vim just picked wacky letters that have nothing to do with anything, except that they're right next to each other.

            when vi was first written lots of keyboards didn't have cursor keys but did have arrows on the hjkl keys (ctrl-h is backspace for instance, ctrl-j is linefeed) so it seemed logical to use those. l for forward one *l*etter also ties in nicely with vi's other action/movement commands: dw = delete word, d5l = delete 5 letters.

            > emacs using fbnp. f, b, n, and p are MUCH more logical

            in vim
      • OT: For all the "get a compliant browser" stuff at the bottom of that page, it doesn't validate [w3.org]. Just thought you ought to know.

  • finally! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Enrico Pulatzo ( 536675 ) on Sunday June 20, 2004 @05:01PM (#9479258)
    I installed this last week and was quite happy to see that the p-bug in windows is now fixed! Basically, if you had text selected and started to type a letter p, a paste would ensue rather than typing the letter p.

    • Re:finally! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Soul-Burn666 ( 574119 )
      And why shouldn't it paste?
      If you have text selected, you are in visual mode, not insert mode. I don't know if it should paste or not (tho that seems most reasonable), but just inserting the letter p into the text? What makes the letter p special, and not for example the letter "y" (to yank to selected text, one the obvious things you want to do with selected text).

      Either that or I completly don't understand what you mean by "started to type the letter p", I assume you meant pressing the p button.
      • In most GUIs, when you select text using a mouse or the keyboard, it puts you in some kind of "type over" mode. ViM now seems to respect this behavior rather than doing it's own thing of allowing commands to be executed. I am unsure whether or not it is a Windows-specific behavioral change or an across-the-board one, but what it boils down to is that ViM on Windows behaves more like a Windows app for this very common and quite expected way.
        • I very much hope this only applies to the "easy mode" of vim, cuz it would really be annoying after i've got so used to it. Cuz, how exactly am I ever supposed to select text, without pressing the buttons?! ctrl-v jjjjj y
          If it started writing j instead of going down... I guess i'll have to stick to old vers or something.

        • Re:finally! (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 20, 2004 @05:57PM (#9479554)
          It's across-the-board. The special mode that Vim goes into upon mouse selection is called "Select mode", indicated by "-- SELECT --" and is documented in the Vim manual accessible via :help.

          It is a distinct mode to the other Vim modes. It is close to, but different to vim's "Visual mode" entered with "v", used for selecting blocks of text.

          (And confusingly, the name "Visual mode" is used in the original Vi for what Vim calls "Normal mode": Vi has no Vim Visual Mode!)

          So the windows "p" behaviour was a bug.

  • It Must Be My Warped Mind... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Steinfiend ( 700505 ) on Sunday June 20, 2004 @05:16PM (#9479353)

    "Happy Vimming!"

    Am I the only one who thinks this sounds insanely dirty?!

  • Oh no! (Score:1, Troll)

    by cbcbcb ( 567490 )
    More crap subverting the beauty that was vim 5.8. I hate the way the latest versions of vim require all sorts of weird vimrc magic just to stop files coming out in unreadable multicolor, with broken magic auto-indent. Vim 6 is almost as bad as MS Word for generally getting in my way. Vim crashes less though...
    • If you don't like it, don't upgrade. You're not locked in to one version of text files like you would be locked into a specific version of .doc files with Word.

      <sarcasm>Or you could always write a patch; you have the source code.</sarcasm>
    • I have been using vi for almost 20 years, and I also /strongly/ dislike vim's multicolor and auto-indent
      features.

      My preferred visual setup is white text on black bg.
      If I try to use vim to edit .c or .cpp programs, the
      comments appear in almost-unreadable dark blue; and
      all the string and numeric literals are deep dark red.

      And the cindent mode is downright infuriating to me.
      Bad editor! Leave text alone! /ME/ decide how indent!!

      Why don't I fix these by setting nocindent, etc. in my
      $HOME/.vimrc ? Because I a
      • I use the following:
        set noautoindent
        set nocindent
        filetype plugin indent off
        set noai

        It appears that I need to disable auto indenting 4 times, and the syntax colouring disappears with it.
      • :set background=dark
        :colorscheme evening

        I also like black backgrounds. Since the rest of the world seems to like white backgrounds and so everything defaults to that, had to spend a bit of time reading the docs to find whether something could be done about vim's settings. If they assumed black bg, then I could blissfully remain ignorant of those features (because I'd rather spend time hacking on code, not fiddling with the tools I need to hack on code), just like all those people who prefer white bg c

  • [2004-06-08] (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vijaya_chandra ( 618284 ) on Sunday June 20, 2004 @07:27PM (#9479962)
    It has been a year since version 6.2.
    It has been almost 2 weeks since 6.3 was released and we get an entry in Announcements on /. now :)

    vim, for the quick editor it is, doesn't deserve this delay.

    If you check the wishlist for 7.0 you would be surprised to observe that support for embedding vim in another gui program is right up in the top slots with *none* voting against it.

    It's good to see people actually agreeing upon something good

    Did you know that 'vim' is a household name in India and its sales [thehindubusinessline.com] amount to more than Rs. 2500 millions!?! That vim here is a dishwashing bar to help ppl get away from "KitchenSink" faster is a different matter.
    • VIM is also the Dutch name of a cleaning product in The Netherlands, where Vim author Bram Moolenaar resides. It's probably the same company as the indian stuff, so this name match might not be completly accidental.
    • Yes, in Chile, Vim is a thick clear greenish liquid use to do your dishwashing, like Palm Olive here in North America. Maybe this is a related P&G stuff.
    • Did you know that 'vim' is a household name in India and its sales amount to...

      Of course, vim is also just a plain old english word [reference.com], though sadly it's not used much anymore. About the only time you ever hear it is in the phrase "vim and vigor", which doesn't come up that often.

      I personally think "vim" is a great name for the editor, whether it was intended to be a play on the word or not. It's always fun in that aloof sort of way when somebody's looking over my shoulder as I code, marvelling at how q

  • ...are available here [rubyforge.org].

    To close, let me just say this.... :wq.

  • Vim or Emacs (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ufnoise ( 732845 )
    A few years ago, 1999. I had the choice of learning emacs or vim. Unfortunately, the computers I had made emacs seem slow and cumbersome, whereas gvim and vim felt much faster. Now I have a faster computer which makes the latency between the two softwares feel about the same. Unfortunately, I love vim too much to let it go and about the only thing I know in emacs is control-c control-x.

    I come from the school of thought that a piece of software should do one thing well, and vim fit the bill. It let me e

    • I come from the school of thought that a piece of software should do one thing well

      Emacs does exactly one thing: execute elisp code. All the rest is just shine. :)

  • A Haretic's Confession (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I must admit that I am addicted to windows-style shortcuts in text editors (shift + arrows to select, ctrl+c to copy, ctrl-v to paste, ctrl + arrows to skip a word, ctrl + shift + arrows to select while skipping, home to go to the beginning of the line (to the first letter after the whitespace at first, then to the beginning of the line), end to go to the end of the line, shift+home to select to the beginning, shift + end to select to the end).

    Does someone please know of some module for Vim and/or Emacs th

    • Re:A Haretic's Confession (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I must admit that I am addicted to windows-style shortcuts in text editors (shift + arrows to select, ctrl+c to copy, ctrl-v to paste, ctrl + arrows to skip a word, ctrl + shift + arrows to select while skipping, home to go to the beginning of the line (to the first letter after the whitespace at first, then to the beginning of the line), end to go to the end of the line, shift+home to select to the beginning, shift + end to select to the end).

      Sure, those keybindings are the default when you install Vim

    • Does someone please know of some module for Vim and/or Emacs that makes use of these shortcuts?

      I would sincerely suggest not to look out for such a module. Please try the vim equivalents for a day and you'd never have to run around your hands all over the keyboard. You wouldn't call them shortcuts once you get used to vim.

      'v' for visual mode, then just move around with i,j,k,l *in* selection mode without straining your pinky holding the shift button all the while
      then 'y' to copy
      and anywhere you need to p

  • Oh, just great! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Feztaa ( 633745 ) on Monday June 21, 2004 @05:13AM (#9482536) Homepage
    I sure picked a great time to switch to Emacs [slashdot.org].

    Oh well, at least I'm enjoying Emacs ;)

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