A Visual Walkthrough of New Features in Vim 7.0

An anonymous reader writes "Anybody who has used Linux or any other OS would be aware of the very powerful and feature rich text editor Vi. This interesting article takes a visual look at some of the new features in the latest version of Vim 7.0 — a Vi clone created by Bram Moolenaar. From the article: 'Just for once, I wouldn't mind siding with the beast if that is what it takes to use Vi. The modern avatar of Vi is Vim — the free editor created by Bram Moolenaar. Riding from strength to strength, this editor in its 7th version is a powerhouse as far as an editor is concerned. When ever I use Vim (or GVim for that matter), it gives me the impression of the Beauty and the Beast.'"

Cream For VIM

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently tried Cream For VIM see - http://sourceforge.net/projects/cream [sourceforge.net]
It is an open source GPL best of add-on's released already built onto VIM. Makes VIM more CUA like, includes versions for MS Windows and many linuxes. I can recommend, and would like to hear others opinions

Emacs

[arun_s]

I used to use Vim extensively, but have now switched to Emacs for the sheer joy of learning something new and interesting. Not trying to flame here, but this is one of the strongest quotes I've read on Emacs (Stepehenson, of course):

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

But vim is pretty cool too (I have windows ports for both the editors so I can use both in office). Arguing over which is better is a waste of time IMO, both do their job fantastically well.

Re:Emacs

[cortana]

On the other hand, arguing is fun and a good way to learn about the editor you don't use because you're not familiar with it. :)

Increasingly unfortunate name

[swordgeek]

While I have no doubt that vim is a powerful and useful editor, it's increasingly large laundry-list of features is dragging it increasingly farther away from both the functionality and the philosophy behind vi. Keep in mind that vi is a visual superset of ex. As such, it was designed as a visual text editor that works on any cursor-addressable terminal. All functions are accessible from the home-row of keys, with the exception of the esc key. Editing features use regular expressions. In short, it's the ideal editor for the touch-typing administrator who can count on it working under fairly rough circumstances.

As a sysadmin, I have to ask how features like pop-up spellcheck and "omini" completion will help me edit config files on a vt102 terminal, (OK, my hard terminal is actually a vt520). vim is basically becoming a graphically-dependent editor that happens to use a similar editing structure to vi. Yes, I know about vi compatability mode, but that just throws out most of the last 'n' years of development.

My point? Not that development should be stopped, or that these goll-durned newfangled features ain't right, but that I wish it wasn't always trumpeted as "vi--but better." Most of the 'better' part of is are things that point away from vi.

Re:Please help me with vim

[nath_de]

Presumably hjkl are much more reliably next to each other than jkl;?

Right, on a German keyboard it is jklö for example. To reach ; you have to use the shift key.

Re:Better XML support?

[cortana]

One thing that could sell some of my co-workers on vim would be if it had better XML features. Nothing too fancy but at least prettyprinting and a wellformedness check.

:%!xmllint --format
:%!xmlwf

Add a few GUI things to make life easier for people using search+replace and it could well become the preferred editor (people are now making do with editpad, notepad2, xmlspy home edition, etc.)

Point those people at gvim (or, if they don't want a modal editor, evim).

The rest of your suggestions are more advanced and I think they fall outside of the scope of a general text editor. I'd try Emacs; it has a lot of features for understanding the semantics of an edited document and can probably do all that you describe.

Re:editors are for wimps

[clickclickdrone]

You may laugh, I knew someone that coded that way. They sat, thought, mapped it all out in their head then typed it all in top to bottom in one go. Worse still, it worked first time 99% of the time and I don't recall them ever producing a single bug. Git. This was Dbase III+ FWIW.

Vim is good

[jandersen]

But it is also becoming what vi was never really intended to be IMO. What makes vi such a great editor is a number of factors, such as:

- it is small
- it does a lot of things that are useful for editing source files
- it is very economical with bandwidth etc
- all commands map to keys that are found on all terminal keyboards

If I should say anything against vim it would be that it can do too many things that are only eye candy or 'cool features'. Fortunately you can turn them off, which I always do. If you develop on several different UNIXes (and other OSes with UNIX like environments) getting used to all the extra features in vim can be a real pain, when you have to work with the classic form of vi.

The elegance of vi

[PhotoGuy]

Not to start an editor war, but one thing a lot of people don't "get" about vi, is how much more natural it is for touch typists. The typewriter keyboard was designed with two shift keys within easy reach. Ctrl and Alt were grafted on later for computers, and are less natural to reach (and in the early days, there were only ones for the left fingers, making things like Ctrl-T fairly hard on the hands).

vi lets you access all of its powerful functionality using only these natural keys for typing (well, plus ESC, which is another computer addition, but its only used to flip out of insert mode, when you're done a bunch of typing, typically). Being able to move to the top of the screen by typing capital-H is a lot faster than control-whatever/control-whatever, or taking your hand off the keyboard, reaching for your mouse, aiming, and clicking. (It still amazes me that this latter approach is the one that leads the way in modern word processors, due to its obvious, but inefficient, nature.)

This is why vi fans often joke as emacs standing for escape-meta-alt-control-shift; to a seasoned vi user, all the escapes in emacs are far more confusing than the biggest complaint about vi, it's two modes. (Reminds one of the joke about the newbie asking the TA for help; the TA says, "you do know vi has two modes, right?" The newbie replies, "yes, the one where it beeps, and the one where it doesn't.") But at the end of the day, the concept of two modes isn't rocket science to learn, and as far as all the key commands one has to learn, it's no different than emacs, where I found the key sequences far more confusing.

Re:editors are for wimps

[NearlyHeadless]

In the non-fiction book The Cuckoo's Egg [wikipedia.org], Clifford Stoll is trying to get a call to his computer in Berkeley traced; the person at British Telecom that he talks to originally took computer programming via a correspondence course. He had to write his program out on coding forms, then mail them. They would be keypunched and he would be mailed back the output from the line printer.

He got in the habit of getting it right the first time.

Re:editors are for wimps

[clickclickdrone]

That was pretty common not that long ago. Most people I know who did programming/science/engineering at University in the 80's did it on clunky old timeshare systems where they wrote the programs (Fortran, usually), punched the cards, sent them off and waited a week. Don't even start talking to them about dropping their card stacks...
On a slight tangent, I worked for a UK bank around 1988 who had a service where they sent big customers mag tapes of the previous nights checks/cheques for reconcilliation. One tape merged two accounts in error so we had to reproduce the two accounts by hand by having an entire department type out and check 20,000 punch cards over a few days and nights. To add insult to injury, the completed tape was then couriered by motorbike to the customer but the bike crashed and the tape got smashed so we had to get another tape done which took a further 24 hours.
Youngsters these days with that there Inteenet thang don't know they're born!

Re:Please help me with vim

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey dude, try Cream. It's Vim but with simpler menus and stuff. http://cream.sf.net/ [sf.net]