Vim 6.4 Released

file cabinet writes to tell us that for the first time in more than a year Vim has released a new version. Version 6.4 stable was released yesterday and while there are no new features added they are touting dozens of bug fixes.

Re:Bugggg fix only. nice

[keesh]

No no no. The features are being added in the 7.x branch, which you can get from CVS. 6.x is purely for maintenance (ie bugfixes). This is a mixed blessing... It means 6.x is extremely stable, but if you want new goodies like spellchecking and intelligent autocompletion, you have to switch to the CVS only branch.

It's a tricky decision. Some projects are way over on the side of "keep throwing out new versions with new features and new bugs". Vim is way over on the other extreme: "release 'new feature' releases every few years and keep the stable branch working". For end users it's a mixed blessing.

Fortunately, the 7.x branch is pretty much stable (as in every day usable) at the moment. I've been using the Gentoo ebuilds (package.masked), which means I get a CVS snapshot which has been at least reasonably well checked and had any icky bugs fixed. I'd hate to miss out on the new toys. The 'numberwidth feature alone makes it worth the upgrade, even if 'spell didn't exist.

Re:Intellisense #1 feature, pay Bram to add it

[Anonymous Coward]

viPlugin is a commercial (but cheap) plugin that adds a vim layer on top of standard eclipse editors. While it does have some bugs, problems with some editors, and doesn't do everything vim does, it does have the basic command, visual, insert mode functionality that I can't live without.

http://www.satokar.com/viplugin/index.php [satokar.com]

This plugin + eclipse is super productive (for me, anyway) when writing java.

Re:I just want to say thanks.

[p2sam]

Vim is charity-ware, please donate.

http://iccf-holland.org/index.html [iccf-holland.org]

Re:Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?

[LnxAddct]

The vimspell script works well.
Regards,
Steve

Re:How do you do a character literal?

[Superfluid Blob]

^Q

Re:Intellisense #1 feature, pay Bram to add it

[kaisyain]

He's already added it in the Vim 7 sources. It was initially called occult completion but is now called omni completion. (Intellisense is a trademarked term.) Read the vim dev list for more details.

Re:I just want to say thanks.

[CodeRx]

Bram is now taking donations [vim.org] to help fund further Vim development. If you donate >10 euro's, you get to vote on new features. This is a great way for those of us who have written countless thousands of lines of code in Vim to show our appreciation.

Re:Bug fixes

[dedazo]

Or you could just source mswin.vim (typically found under $VIMRUNTIME) and essentially have a MS-style keymap emulation. Put it in your ~/.vimrc, and make sure you include the 'behave mswin' line before you source it.

If you're a loyal Vim user...

[fm6]

... don't forget that it's charityware [vim.org].

Re:Wishes for the next VIM and why use Vim

[p2sam]

Vim has support for split screen editing for years. And vertical split screen is supported since Version 6.

change log

[m()p3s]

The change log;
----------------
This section is about improvements made between version 6.3 and 6.4.

This is a bug-fix release. There are also a few new features. The major number of new items is in the runtime files and translations.

The big MS-Windows version now uses:
Ruby version 1.8.3
Perl version 5.8.7
Python version 2.4.2

Changed *changed-6.4*
-------

Removed runtime/tools/tcltags, Exuberant ctags does it better.

Added *added-6.4*
-----
Alsaconf syntax file (Nikolai Weibull)
Eruby syntax, indent, compiler and ftplugin file (Doug Kearns)
Esterel syntax file (Maurizio Tranchero)
Mathematica indent file (Steve Layland)
Netrc syntax file (Nikolai Weibull)
PHP compiler file (Doug Kearns)
Pascal indent file (Neil Carter)
Prescribe syntax file (Klaus Muth)
Rubyunit conpiler file (Doug Kearns)
SMTPrc syntax file (Kornel Kielczewski)
Sudoers syntax file (Nikolai Weibull)
TPP syntax file (Gerfried Fuchs)
VHDL ftplugin file (R. Shankar)
Verilog-AMS syntax file (S. Myles Prather)

Bulgarian keymap (Alberto Mardegan)
Canadian keymap (Eric Joanis)

Hungarian menu translations in UTF-8 (Kantra Gergely)
Ukrainian menu translations (Bohdan Vlasyuk)

Irish message translations (Kevin Patrick Scannell)

Configure also checks for tclsh8.4.

Fixed *fixed-6.4*
-----
"dFxd;" deleted the character under the cursor, "d;" didn't remember the exclusiveness of the motion.

When using "set laststatus=2 cmdheight=2" in the .gvimrc you may only get one line for the cmdline. (Christian Robinson) Invoke command_height() after the GUI has started up.

Gcc would warn "dereferencing type-punned pointer will break strict -aliasing rules". Avoid using typecasts for variable pointers.

Gcc 3.x interprets the -MM argument differently. Change "-I /path" to "-isystem /path" for "make depend".

Patch 6.3.001
Problem: ":browse split" gives the file selection dialog twice. (Gordon Bazeley) Same problem for ":browse diffpatch".
Solution: Reset cmdmod.browse before calling do_ecmd().
Files: src/diff.c, src/ex_docmd.c

Patch 6.3.002
Problem: When using translated help files with non-ASCII latin1 characters in the first line the utf-8 detection is wrong.
Solution: Properly detect utf-8 characters. When a mix of encodings is detected continue with the next language and avoid a "no matches" error because of "got_int" being set. Add the directory name to the error message for a duplicate tag. Files: src/ex_cmds.c

Patch 6.3.003
Problem: Crash when using a console dialog and the first choice does not have a default button. (Darin Ohashi)
Solution: Allocate two more characters for the [] around the character for the default choice.
Files: src/message.c

Patch 6.3.004
Problem: When searching for a long string (140 chars in a 80 column terminal) get three hit-enter prompts. (Robert Webb)
Solution: Avoid the hit-enter prompt when giving the message for wrapping around the end of the buffer. Don't give that message again when the string was not found.
Files: src/message.c, src/search.c

Patch 6.3.005
Problem: Crash when searching for a pattern with a character offset and starting in a closed fold. (Frank Butler)
Solution: Check for the column to be past the end of the line. Al

Re:hats off to Bram, Bill Joy, and ATT

[morcego]

Ignoring CSV for a minute, if you'd like to replace all text from the 20th through 23rd characters of arbitrary text with the string "abcd", how would you do it?

You mean something like this ? :%s@^\(.\{19\}\).\{4\}@\1abcd@g

Although I would usually do that using sed, not vim.

In text processing, the workload determines the ability of a "ve" user (internal IBM tool) to surpass my vi efficiency. Typically, it's when the ve user mouse selects a column and then does replaces on it. I'd like to mimic this behavior using only my qwerty pad and some newly aquired vi skills.

Oh my god, they are still using that ? I remember the religious wars of VE versus VX when I worked there, pretty much like the VI versus EMACS wars we see out here.

The real trick is a good background in sed and regular expressions. Then you can use :%s to your heart content.

Re:I just want to say thanks.

[Mr. Hankey]

Start up a copy of vim, type ":about uganda" (without quotes) and press enter to find out. In short, the author of vim did volunteer work for the clinic for a year and has visited there on several occasions since then. He wishes for others to help the clinic as well.

Re:Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?

[Afrosheen]

The thing wrong with pico is it isn't free, hence why distros like Centos and Whitebox include its free clone, nano. http://www.asty.org/articles/20010702pine.html [asty.org] has a decent article detailing pine's default text editor, pico's licensing scheme and why it's bad, and goes on to explain why nano is a suitable replacement.

Re:Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?

[akaempf]

Ctrl [ acts as escape. Vim also lets you reprogram other key combinations to act as escape, e.g., Ctrl Space.

Re:Yipee!

[morbuz]

Also, when I do a compile on Emacs with 'perl -c' I can automatically go to the errors in the Perl code. In vim, I had to enter manually the regular expressions for matching those.

Vim can do that too, for almost any programming language. :compiler perl :make

Re:Intellisense #1 feature, pay Bram to add it

[Splab]

I got tab completion in my vim:
In my .vimrc:

function InsertTabWrapper()
        let col = col('.') - 1
        if !col || getline('.')[col - 1] !~ '\k'
                return "\<tab>"
        else
                return "\<c-p>"
        endif
endfunction

in .vim/ftplugin/c.vim:

set dictionary-=~/.vim/clist.txt dictionary+=~/.vim/clist.txt
set complete-=k complete+=k

this gives me auto completion in c files where .vim/clist is a list of c functions.

Re:Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?

[J'raxis]

Polish apparently uses jj to transliterate Arabic [wikipedia.org]; see Omar Chajjam. I don't know Polish, but it probably uses it for other things, too, since transliteration generally means bringing foreign words into your language's orthography.

That also ignores the fact that people don't just use editors for typing natural text but for typing code: I'm sure someone's source code contains name tokens with jj in them.

Re:emacs and vim are too difficult to use

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to call you nuts, but when I got thinking about it I decided you may have a point. My needs in an editor are regular expression find & replace that allow you to save and reuse substrings (like "s/\(.*\)Blah/\1/g"), a way to run a command on every line (like :g/^$/d), and a macro language. There are probably editors around that meet all 3 of those requirements that are easier to use than vi, but I use vi anyway.

Then again, I already know vi and it exceeds my needs in every way so why should I change?

So yeah, we probably use vi out of habit, but why is that necessarily a bad thing?