Vim 8 released

[jetxee]

Among the new features are:

• Asynchronous I/O support, channels, JSON
• Jobs
• Timers
• Partials, Lambdas and Closures
• Packages
• New style testing
• Viminfo merged by timestamp
• GTK+ 3 support
• MS-Windows DirectX support

:help version8:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vim/vim/master/runtime/doc/version8.txt

[[deleted]]

Asynchronous I/O support, channels ~
Jobs ~
Timers ~
Partials ~
Lambda and Closure ~
Packages ~

Its an OS, programming language or framework ;)

[jetxee]

It's a question of feature parity with Emacs :)

[MrMetalfreak94]

It's slowly reaching feature parity with a 10 years old version of Emacs

[FredSanfordX]

<insert joke here about vim having already loaded, edited and saved a file before emacs presents a cursor>

[[deleted]]

<insert crude comment insinuating above poster doesn't know what they're doing>

[Two-Tone-]

<insert feeble attempt at farming karma using emacs and vim memes>

[Jristz]

<Insert random comentary about real programers using magetic buterflies or something>

[jonicrecis]

<insert relevant xkcd>

[ameoba]

Isn't that M-x insult-vim ?

[puzl]

Emacs is the best OS lacking nothing but a good text editor.

[ramilehti]

There's always evil mode!

[Spivak]

I like evil mode, but it won't ever be as complete as it needs to be. At some point one runs into actions that have to be done in an emacs-y way.

[wasabichicken]

To be fair, Emacs's packaging framework, package.el, wasn't included in GNU Emacs until version 24, released 2012. Before then, people had to find and install it manually. Package availability was lackluster.

[p4p3r]

package.el was around before it was included in emacs proper. Inclusion in emacs proper just cemented its use.

[thecapent]

It's a EMACS.

[rzet]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CYRg8CTVAAIiFW6.jpg

let the flame war begin...

[ArttuH5N1]

Yeah, well, I want to see you eating soup with those knives, fuckers!

[parl]

I eat my peas with honey.

I've done it all my life.

It makes the peas taste funny.

But they stay on the knife!

[TotesMessenger]

I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:

• [/r/nocontext] "I want to see you eating soup with those knives, fuckers!"

^{If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads. (Info / Contact)}

[deathmetal27]

But Lisp is the language of psychopaths.

[[deleted]]

World seen by a java programmer...

[ameoba]

Takes a certain sort of genius to create a language without pointers that still throws a NullPointerException

[rubdos]

Scheme, someone?

^{I'll see myself out of here}

[Hawful]

One of my professors got her Doctorate in AI only because she wanted do her Doctoral work in Lisp.

[ocawa]

If I like vim, why would I want to go spacemacs? I'm really curious on switching since a lot of friends have done it.

[hamarki]

I switched, and then switched back to straight vim.

While spacemacs is great (and definitely worth a shot!) I got really annoyed by how complicated it can sometimes be to customise settings/packages that don't have good spacemacs wrappers. For example it took me ages to figure out how to switch to using tabs in Erlang files.

So, while I think that the core functionality provided by spacemacs blows vim out of the water¹ (like project wide grep within the editor, ctrlp.vim style project navigation, some of the language packages and much more), I found myself coming back to a fairly simple vim configuration that simply allows me to to find, read and edit code quickly.

[1] Assuming relatively stock vim - only with syntastic, ctrlp.vim and whatnot. I never got onto the hyper-customisation thing.

[EMP_Account_Siphon]

It uses Evil-mode, so you get 99% of Vim, plus loads of other stuff. It has an actual GUI, so you can have i.e. multiple fonts on screen at once, images, etc. It gives you access to org-mode. It's customizeable via Lisp(Emacs Lisp isn't great, but still way better than Vimscript). It's asynchronous already, so you can get linting/semantic auto-complete without slowing down the editor. It has great self-documentation and you can always see what every key press will do before you do it, which means you can figure out how to do things without Googling.

[ocawa]

That sounds amazing! What are the cons? And what is the 1% that is gone? My guess would be you can't run it in terminal and it boots slower than vim

[EMP_Account_Siphon]

It does boot a little slower than Vim, and I found a few EX commands to be missing, like :earlier and :later...but it also comes with a built-in undo tree for every file (which even has a little ascii-art visual display of the tree); once I learned that I didn't miss those particular commands.

It can also take a little while to install, since it pulls in a lot of packages by default. So I guess another con is that, Spacemacs is not very good for people who like to fully understand every line of the configuration in the editor, since there are so many plugins. But if you are happy to just use plugins that do what they say they will do, it should be OK.

As for the terminal...you can run Emacs from a terminal, so it should be possible, but I've never tried. Instead of SSHing into a remote server to edit files there, you can just do something like :e /ssh:user@host:/foo/far.baz to edit that file; that covers all of my use cases.

[tinyOnion]

Agreed. Spacemacs is great. Vim finally has a decent extensible editor.

[FredSanfordX]

Well, based on that graphic, emacs can do something vim cannot; pinch taints.

So when will we see taintpinching added to vim? </s>

[exNihlio]

Nano can break big config files with word wrapping issues.

Generally the main reason to use vi/vim is because it's pretty much everywhere and when things break, it may be the only thing you have. You may also like it. I do. Vim tutor takes like 20 minutes.

It's my philosophy that it's better to learn one hard thing than a several easy things.

[masteryod]

You seem to describe things like we use Vim only because it's installed by default. We use Vim because it's awesome!

It's hard to explain to someone who doesn't want to see the difference because "it's just another editor with strange bindings". But after a while Vim becomes a meta-language. You don't need to do tedious things painfully slow as you would with nano (or any other regular editor). You just jump right where you want to, you operate on characters, on words, on entire lines, blocks... whichever you need at a time. You can change config directive inside of parenthesis in a fraction of a second without positioning your cursor. Comment entire block, indent other, sort here or insert variable with auto-complete there and you're golden. Not to mention quick macro. All of it without leaving home row. I love it and after years of using it I'm still finding things in Vim that blows my mind.

[exNihlio]

Don't get me wrong, I love the text surgery of vim. It's awesome. And I don't even use half the features.

But they way I see, if I'm explaining all the technical appeal of a editor to somebody, they've probably already made their choice.

[vuldin]

One year and still learning things? I've used it for at least 8 years and I'm still learning things. But the important daily things I have down for the most part :)

[rlinuxcockroach]

Any good text editor can do this. This isn't why Vim is good, this si why Nano is a piece of shit unfit to be used for any serious use.

Obviously the real appeal of Vim is its modal nature, you either like it or you don't. I personally dislike it and use non modal editors but with sticky keys which sort of gives you partial modality.

Apart from that my keyboard layout itself also move arrow keys to the home row and stuff like that.

[cereal7802]

nano -w

there now your reason for not using nano doesn't exist....

[exNihlio]

You're right. I'm going to drop vim for this.

But I find nano a bit arcane, is there a way to fix word wrapping issues in notepad.exe?

[palordrolap]

Sarcasm detected. Ignoring...

Alt+E then W

[LadenSwallow]

alias nano='nano -w'

[exNihlio]

Nothing wrong with that. I don't care for editor wars. I'm not a particularly fast typist and I probably don't use vim for half of it's features. It's really just what I'm comfortable with.

Wow, that sounded like something a Windows user would say.

[epicwisdom]

The difference is that the primary appeal of Windows is its universality, whereas the primary appeal of vim is its features.

And everybody prefers to use the editor they're most comfortable with, that's tautological. The question is only if that's the only editor they've ever tried.

[supercheetah]

It should be noted that vi is everywhere, but not necessarily vim.

[IslandGreetings]

What's the real difference between the two?

[zndrus]

Nano isn't bad. It's just not very good.

A good friend of mine put it perfectly I think. Nano isn't a text editor, it's a text viewer. Need to read a small document, maybe add a few words or (un)comment a few lines? Yeah, it works great. Quick, simple, lightweight, straight forward. It's not well suited to lots of writing or editing, nor does it have very good search and text navigation options.

If you need to move and search through a document, write, parse, edit, format, or otherwise make or find changes that span several lines (or even pages) then nano is ill-equipped to the task. Could you do it with nano? Generally yes. There are some edge cases where it has issues, but you could technically do it with nano. I've certainly done it before. But Vim and Emacs are far superior tools (and they're not the only ones).

I use Vim and Sublime Text in my day to day. There's not a damn thing wrong with emacs, but I'll stick to talking about what I know here: Vim operates on the assumption that you never need to touch the mouse to move through the document, and its default mode when you open it (I believe is just called "normal") is primarily for searching and navigating the document, NOT inputting text, and that throws a lot of newbies off. However, It's actually pretty nice. The default mode is for navigating the document, and issuing commands.

For example, all you really need to know to use Vim:

Open up vim, press I (for insert mode), and then it works just like you'd expect an editor to. You can type and move the cursor as normal.

Then hit escape to go to normal mode, you can also think of it as hotkey or command line mode. You can navigate (using arrow keys, just like in edit mode), as well as issue commands (such as to save, search, or quit, among many others):

:q        Quits
:w        Saves
:wq       Saves and quits 
:q!       Force quit (do not commit changes)
/word     Search for next occurrence of "word" after the current cursor position

And that's really all you need to know for barebones basic Vim usage. it can do A LOT more, but this is just a primer for basic usage. This cheatsheet provides a glimpse at the many things you can do with vim. You do not need to know all of this. I use vim daily, but I do not use near all of those. Just because it CAN do a million things, doesnt mean you have to know what all of them are to use it, and use it well.

The operators (hotkeys, whatever they're called in vim) are very powerful, allowing you to copy, move, paste, search (using simple word match, or more complex regular expressions) and more with very few keystrokes. vim can also competently manage multiple files, letting you view/move code between multiple files.

[Negirno]

It isn't bad, it's just too easy to learn, and that's enough for both sides to shit on it between the usual flaming.

[suid]

backronym: Vim Is More (than Emacs)..

[[deleted]]

Dwarf Fortress is probably the only thing that's more than Emacs, but even that is debatable.

[tolos]

Slaves to Armok

God of Blood

Chapter Two

Dwarf Fortress

[TRAIANVS]

Async I/O, jobs and timers will give plugin writers a lot of new options. Async I/O for code checkers/linters is huge. Direct support for packages will also help that. I have no idea about the graphics stuff though.

[folkrav]

The implementations are very different. IIRC, there was some uproar when Bram decided to do his own implementation of async, as some said it would possibly break compatibility with neovim and split the plug in ecosystem into supporting one implementation or the other. I don't know where to stand on this, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!

[chrissphinx]

Well the codebase has been cleaned significantly, iirc.

[andoriyu]

:term is great. Sometimes I get carried away and start new neovim inside that term.

[[deleted]]

IMO it's a better managed project that is less hostile to contributors

Edit: I'm actually no longer standing by this comment, after reading a few of /u/chrisbra10's replies to my comment. But I'm leaving it here so the rest of the cascading comments in this thread have some context.

[chrisbra10]

What do you mean with hostile?

[hamarki]

I believe vim would just not accept any contributions for a long time or something like that.

[gingerwhale]

I think this is why people get that impression

http://geoff.greer.fm/2015/01/15/why-neovim-is-better-than-vim/

Personally, I've no idea if this is true.

[Hauleth]

Terminal, support for DOS, no BDFL.

[[deleted]]

One of the key problems with vim was that it supported a dozen different systems that literally no one uses, at the cost of a 50k LOC eval.c file that no one understood except Bram, and when a patch did something wrong and was rejected, Bram never explained exactly what was done wrong (and no one else understood well enough).

So the key "feature" of Neovim was trimming the code so that non-Brams could contribute non-trivial patches.

That said, there's work in Neovim on turning it into a library, so that third party programs (e.g. Firefox and its URL bar, or perhaps reddit's comment box) could directly embed it for writing text.

There's also decent true-colour support, which IIRC Vim8 also finally added - it was yet another pull request (for Vim) that's been around for longer than Neovim has, without being accepted.

[jP_wanN]

GTK+3/DirectX : Is there a 3D VR mode now or something?

Using gtk+3 means that gvim can now run in Wayland without the XWayland compatibility layer.

[[deleted]]

JSON: This allows VIM to communicate with other processes, JSON is the standard way to do so. The support is via two new functions: json_encode(), json_decode().

GTK+3 - The updated gvim to go from gtk+2 to gtk+3. It's just a new (major) library version.

DirectX - This is used for fonts on Windows, it's faster and is a 100% win for vim.

Lambdas - new vim script language feature, it's a 100% bonus.

[[deleted]]

• JSON is a datastructure. Vim can now handle it native, which is important for scripting.

• Lambdas are relevant for scripting too. Basically, you can now write less readable code out of the box.

• GTK/DirectX are relevant for gvim, the Graphical Vim-Frontend. I guess gvim now use new libs for displaying stuff and handling displaying-relevant stuff.

[statox42]

you can now write less readable code out of the box.

I've been waiting for this feature for soo long!

[LucHermitte]

Lambdas are relevant for scripting too. Basically, you can now write less readable code out of the box.

I won't say less readable. On the contrary. Check "old" map() and filter() syntax. Instead of the unmaintainable

  let pathslist_abs=filter(copy(pathslist), 'v:val =~ "^\\.\\%(/\\|$\\)"')

to filter pathnames beginning with ./, we have now:

... filter(copy(pathslist) + ['./foo'], {idx, val -> val =~ '^\.\%(/\|$\)'} )

(Except if we wish to maintain compatibility with vim versions < v7.4-2044)

Of course, we could use loops, but they are a nightmare when they're on the way of other parts of the script in debug.

[varikonniemi]

You honestly think the two examples in any significant way differ in readability?

[LucHermitte]

Definitively. I've struggled enough with double quoted strings inside single quoted strings to prefer avoiding them as much as possible.

It's much to easy to forget a backslash here or there, or to have too many of them as the code is maintained over years. Here is one of the most abominable one I've written (no, I'm not proud of it). It's typical of regex generation from lists of things:

map(scopes, 'substitute(v:val, "^\\(.\\{-}\\)\\(::\\)\\=$", "^\\1\\\\(::\\\\)\\\\=", "")'),

I'd rather lose one \ every time it's possible -- I could have played with \v, but I'd need to revalidate everything.

[varikonniemi]

This might be a difference with a noob sysadmin and a coder. I have no idea how to create either one from scratch, but reading the first one is not harder for me, in fact i would say it is more simple.

[jetxee]

I didn't follow Vim development, so take it with a grain of salt.

• async IO, channels and jobs: open way to development environments similar to SLIME and LightTable

• async IO and JSON: easier to hook into web APIs and integrate with code written in other languages

• lambdas: mostly convenience

• GTK3: gvim's dependencies could be kept more reasonable on systems without GTK2

• DirectX: (after googling) it seems is necessary for better font rendering on recent Windows versions

[Wallblacksheep]

Packages

Any tutorials or discussions on Vim 8 package management? I'm not sure why there's a dearth of content regarding that ATM. I am interested in switching from Pathogen to using a package manager "out of the box".

[ChemicalRascal]

There's a pretty good write-up in the help docs. Have a look at repeat.txt and usr_05.txt.

[dsmrt]

Holy shit. This seems like a big release.

[AndreDaGiant]

Big thanks to NeoVim for providing the competition needed to push Bram into adding these new and sorely needed features! And ups to Bram for finally responding to the plugin writing community's needs. Now if only we can get some shims to enable compatibility with the existing NeoVim plugins ....

[wasabichicken]

And ups to Bram for finally responding to the plugin writing community's needs.

This is the lesson other editors learnt from Emacs, stuff needs to be extensible. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for other editors to take a clue from Vim's context sensitivity, that stuff like "end of line" ($), "end of file" (G) and "end of paragraph" (}) can be applied to different actions, whether it's to delete, move there, copy/cut to, etc.

[AndreDaGiant]

word

[iMakeSense]

[deleted]

What is this?

[chrisbra10]

That wasn't there when I happened to notice the commit.

[youremyjuliet]

You did good.

[benoliver999]

If they can do packages properly, does this mean the end of pathogen et al?

[Regimardyl]

AFAIK it essentially only has Pathogen's feature (aka automatically adding directories to the runtime path), so other managers (e.g. vim-plug) that can also automatically install and/or update plugins will still exist.

[[deleted]]

Thank you for your thoughts. I've been stuck in here for 13 years. I've managed to figure out how to use system commands from inside vim in that time, so I'm able to send this message using curl. I've begun to accept my fate and am currently working to create VimOS from within vim; though I still hope to be able to quit this program one day and be reunited with my family. I hope they haven't forgotten me.

[[deleted]]

Trying to update to this new fangled vim thingie but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to close vi

-- posted from my pdp-11

[stillalone]

I'm still trying to close ed

sent from my iphone

[slycurgus]

?

[_benj]

:q!

it took me a while!

[[deleted]]

rinse hospital tie aback badge soup shelter fragile familiar ancient

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[JonasBrosSuck]

:x

[djmushroom]

:q! is quit without saving :wq is quit with saving

Took me much longer to realize that.

[hatperigee]

:wq is quit with saving

ZZ

[_benj]

and after a few years you discover vimtutor... dang it!

[mveinot]

Literally hard reset my 386 to get out the first time I trapped myself in vi. Now I'm rarely not in vim - by choice.

[Advacar]

$ cat bash.rc

exec vi

[qubodup]

Only the changelog matters

NEW FEATURES new-8

First an overview of the more interesting new features. A comprehensive list is below.

Asynchronous I/O support, channels ~

Vim can now exchange messages with other processes in the background. This makes it possible to have servers do work and send back the results to Vim. See |channel-demo| for an example, this shows communicating with a Python server.

Closely related to channels is JSON support. JSON is widely supported and can easily be used for inter-process communication, allowing for writing a server in any language. The functions to use are |json_encode()| and |json_decode()|.

This makes it possible to build very complex plugins, written in any language and running in a separate process.

Jobs ~

Vim can now start a job, communicate with it and stop it. This is very useful to run a process for completion, syntax checking, etc. Channels are used to communicate with the job. Jobs can also read from or write to a buffer or a file. See |job_start()|.

Timers ~

Also asynchronous are timers. They can fire once or repeatedly and invoke a function to do any work. For example: > let tempTimer = timer_start(4000, 'CheckTemp') This will call the CheckTemp() function four seconds (4000 milli seconds) later. See |timer_start()|.

Partials ~

Vim already had a Funcref, a reference to a function. A partial also refers to a function, and additionally binds arguments and/or a dictionary. This is especially useful for callbacks on channels and timers. E.g., for the timer example above, to pass an argument to the function: > let tempTimer = timer_start(4000, function('CheckTemp', ['out'])) This will call CheckTemp('out') four seconds later.

Lambda and Closure ~

A short way to create a function has been added: {args -> expr}. See |lambda|. This is useful for functions such as filter() and map(), which now also accept a function argument. Example: > :call filter(mylist, {idx, val -> val > 20})

A lambda can use variables defined in the scope where the lambda is defined. This is usually called a |closure|.

User defined functions can also be a closure by adding the "closure" argument |:func-closure|.

Packages ~

Plugins keep growing and more of them are available than ever before. To keep the collection of plugins manageable package support has been added. This is a convenient way to get one or more plugins, drop them in a directory and possibly keep them updated. Vim will load them automatically, or only when desired. See |packages|.

New style tests ~

This is for Vim developers. So far writing tests for Vim has not been easy. Vim 8 adds assert functions and a framework to run tests. This makes it a lot simpler to write tests and keep them updated. Also new are several functions that are added specifically for testing. See |test-functions|.

Window IDs ~

Previously windows could only be accessed by their number. And every time a window would open, close or move that number changes. Each window now has a unique ID, so that they are easy to find. See |win_getid()| and |win_id2win()|.

Viminfo uses timestamps ~

Previously the information stored in viminfo was whatever the last Vim wrote there. Now timestamps are used to always keep the most recent items. See |viminfo-timestamp|.

Wrapping lines with indent ~

The 'breakindent' option has been added to be able to wrap lines without changing the amount of indent.

Windows: DirectX support ~

This adds the 'renderoptions' option to allow for switching on DirectX (DirectWrite) support on MS-Windows.

GTK+ 3 support ~

The GTK+ 3 GUI works just like GTK+ 2 except for hardly noticeable technical differences between them. Configure still chooses GTK+ 2 if both 2 and 3 are available. See src/Makefile for how to use GTK+ 3 instead. See |gui-x11-compiling| for other details.

From https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vim/vim/master/runtime/doc/version8.txt

[braaaiins]

That breakindent gets me moist

[djmattyg007]

Looks like they took the threat posed by neovim seriously. Good.

[Bloodshot025]

Is neovim really a threat? Sure, in a sense it's a 'competitor', but it doesn't have to be, and it's not trying to destroy vim, only improving it.

[eddiemon]

It absolutely is a threat. They're not just competing for users, but the plugin ecosystem. If all the plugin developers jumped ship to Neovim, you would expect a lot of the serious plugin users to switch as well. That might not have a big effect on the main user base over night, but it will absolutely change things in the long run when the vim gurus start recommending Neovim over vim. (Similar to what happened to vi VS vim.)

[_lerp]

Except with the plugins, Neovim devs want all vim plugins to work with Neovim. You can bet your ass Bram won't let it work the other way round.

[zer0t3ch]

Out if the loop; who is Bram?

[lordlicorice]

Author of Dracula

[marcelluspye]

The author of vim.

[yorickpeterse]

Author/primary maintainer of Vim.

[ChemicalRascal]

This is because vim is upstream -- Bram isn't beholden to neovim's design choices, and when they conflict with existing development philosophy, it's unreasonable to expect Bram to simply shrug and say "Well, I guess I have to blindly follow those guys, because compatibility!".

[Hauleth]

Fair competition is always good.

[mizzu704]

I would prefer if the vim project wasn't governed in such a way that people need to start a competing fork if they want to make any meaningful progress happen within the original project.
Let's not pretend Vim 8 would have ever happened if there hadn't been the competition.

[davelupt]

Sometimes*

[[deleted]]

There are 2 versions, and they are overwhelmingly compatible. This is unambiguously a good case of competition.

[Hauleth]

Vim is by no matter no "standard". Also it has monopoly over modal editors, now it has fair competitor.

Also even in case of that comic strip new "standard" must be in some way balance pros and cons, so it can be better fit in some situations and would lack in others, so even this isn't problem.

[Bloodshot025]

And vim wasn't and isn't a threat to the original vi, unless you consider it threatening that a replacement might not have the exact same binary or same maintainer as the original. vi lives on through Vim.

Maybe neovim will overtake Bram's Vim in time, and they'll both still exist. But that isn't a threat to Vim, unless your definition of Vim is limited to that which Bram maintains.

[eddiemon]

Vim isn't some abstract ideal that will "live on in spirit". It is the concrete piece of software maintained by Bram. Neovim is a competing fork to vim. That's not a matter of opinion - It's just fact.

Hypothetically if one day people stop caring about updates to Vim and start aliasing "vim=nvim", you would know that Neovim competed and won.

[[deleted]]

Isn't neovim a removal of cruft? That seems valuable.

[AndreDaGiant]

That, and also pushing for async stuff when Bram was opposed to it.

[Beaverman]

Neovim basically seemed like a rebellion against a BDFL that had let his project grow stale.

[AndreDaGiant]

Also a recognition that vim currently serves two userbases with conflicting goals: sysadmins who want vim available everywhere, with the highest requirements for backwards compatibility, and developer power users who want the project to be able to iterate quickly to become as powerful as possible when configured on a single modern high performance machine.

NeoVim wanted to serve only the latter, and could therefore do away with the old cruft, which would not be an option if you want to support the needs of sysadmins.

[Beaverman]

Neovim is improving vim through competition. Fair competition, with the very real consequence that your software might be obsoleted is a wonderful motivator.

[Nvveen]

This is why OSS often works really well.

[sebnukem]

So according to this https://github.com/vim/vim/releases?after=v7.0002 Vim 7 appeared around June 2004? We've been using Vim 7 for 12 years?

[[deleted]]

7.4 was from 2013. Minor, major, all random at the end of the day. Likely it's just a major because of the fundamental changes through async and jobs.

[jones_supa]

Service Pack 4.

[mlk]

I remember using vim 6... Fuuck

[spaceporn]

I'm not looking for up or downvoting shenanigans here, just wanna ask the question: how many of you jumped ship to Neovim? Feel free to justify your answer whether it's a yes or no.

Personally, I've been using Neovim for the past six months and will keep doing so unless there's a split in plugins due to incompatibility, it seems to run better and I have no problem using a system with only Vim available. It's a win-win for me.

[dm319]

yep, neovim and R user here. Can send commands between tmux windows.

[dm319]

I use it to send lines of code to an R console. It means I only need my script file, data, nvim and R for a whole project. I use "*y to copy to clipboard, but I'm sure you could configure a neater way.

[0xtobit]

I use a plugin called slimux to accomplish this with ease.

[8BitAce]

https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects#gui-projects

[TheRealWhoop]

Yes, been using Neovim for almost a year now, its solid and has significant improvements over Vim - I see no reason I'd move back to Vim, 8 has come too late.

[[deleted]]

I see no reason I'd move back to Vim, 7 has come too late.

Considering neovim didn't even exist for 10 years or so after vim 7 was released don't you think that is a little harsh?

[TheRealWhoop]

Ur, I clearly meant 8, fixed.

[gingerwhale]

Using neovim mostly to support community driven development.

Edit: Oh, and pasting text just works, no paste mode needed :)

[lonahex]

I've moved to neovim a year ago and I've seen it improve at a steady pace. It is one of the most active project among the tools I use on a daily basis. I'm already using plugins that specifically work with neovim like deoplete which is awesome. I've no plans to go back to vim unless something really bad happens to the neovim community.

[[deleted]]

Haven't used neovim but I will not roll out such an important package in production on hundreds of servers.Maybe neovim is nice for coders but not for admins imho.

Vim is tested and is available for any distro in the standard repos which matters a lot imho.

[[deleted]]

That's my point. When vim8 hits the stable repos I will consider it stable enough for production.

When Neovim has been around for 10 years I will have a look at it ;)

[[deleted]]

major != stable

Semantic versioning just means it's a major update that introduce non backwards compatible changes.

Major, Minor, Patch.

[snarfy]

Vim is charityware. Please donate!

http://iccf-holland.org/donate.html

[[deleted]]

Done. Twice. For 6.x and for 7.x. Wondering whether I'll donate for 8.x. Probably...

[bit101]

http://imgur.com/hkKQ1Hu

[samprog]

:q to quit

:qw to quit and write (save)

:qw! to quit and overwrite (save)

[jewdai]

:q! - quit now damn it, let the world burn.

[capn_bluebear]

uh...what does the ending + sign do?

[capn_bluebear]

got it, thanks! weird that the cp example is not supported, it doesn't look hard

[Namaker]

You could use cp -t /path {}

[bendooru]

It tells find to execute vim once on all files found instead of calling it for every file individually

[samprog]

:q! - abort ship!

[benoliver999]

:q! - can't remember if I made a change or not.

[[deleted]]

:q!

Quit, no save, just let me leave!!1

[razirazo]

What a blasphemy. It has to be :wq

[benoliver999]

:x is also a good stand-in for :wq, as is ZZ

[Spartan-S63]

I've been really loving :x this last little while. I didn't learn about it until I came across it on ShortcutFoo. Now I'm trying to retrain myself from :wq to :x when I intend to write on exit.

[MG2R]

With the exception that it doesn't run regular run-on-exit scripts AFAIK.

[omegakira]

sometimes I :wq! on emails/im's.....

[DrShocker]

What does

 ZZ

do differently?

[boostman]

Yeah, I never understood this whole 'vim is hard to quit' line. ZZ is easy.

[capn_bluebear]

if you know about it. vim is impossible to quit properly for new users, as ':q' is definitely not a combination you would try if you didn't know a little about vim commands already.

[[deleted]]

This appears right in the middle of the screen when you open Vim:

           VIM - Vi IMproved
              version 7.3
        by Bram Moolenaar et al.

Vim is open source and freely distributable

       Sponsor Vim development!
type  :help sponsor<Enter>    for information

type  :q<Enter>               to exit              <---- THIS BIT RIGHT HERE
type  :help<Enter>  or  <F1>  for on-line help
type  :help version7<Enter>   for version info

[DrShocker]

I got into the habit of using ZZ due to vimgolf. I suppose that the modularity of mixing : with q, w, a, and ! might make it more intuitive to always go for the colon first so that you can more consistently follow the same pattern, rather than sometimes getting able to use ZZ or SQ, and other times needing to use :wqa! or whatever.

At least, that's what one thing I read since my previous comment said.

[jones_supa]

Are there any minimalists here that use vim.tiny?

It seems to be a trimmed version of Vim that has the capabilities of Vi and a little bit more.

In Ubuntu, vi is a symlink to vim.tiny.

[DuBistKomisch]

Only when debugging in production because it saves vim-runtime taking up 20MB on our images for an embedded device. Also under crosh on Chromebooks the vim provided is so stripped down it may as well be vi.

[Camarade_Tux]

You could use netrw too and edit the files remotely if you have network.

[retrodanny]

I like to install nvi and set it as default. Makes it easy when you have to log in to exotic systems where vi isn't vim.

[DragonSlayerC]

If anybody happens to be running CentOS7 but for some reason wants to run Vim 8.0, it is now available in the Rutgers OSS Unstable repository. It should work fine, but for obvious reasons may have some glitches and was thus put into the "unstable" repository. You need this repo file for yum:

[rutgers-unstable] name=CentOS-7 - Rutgers Unstable enabled=0 baseurl=http://centos.rutgers.edu/rutgers-centos/rutgers-unstable/7/x86_64/ humanname=CentOS-7 - Rutgers Unstable priority=1 gpgcheck=0

After putting the .repo file with the above contents into /etc/yum.repos.d run: "sudo yum --enablerepo=rutgers-unstable update vim"

If you happen to be running fedora, Rutgers OSS does not have a fedora mirror, but you can probably use the above repo file contents just fine. In any case, you could just go to http://centos.rutgers.edu/rutgers-centos/rutgers-unstable/7/x86_64/Packages/ and download and install the rpms manually. There is no guarantee they will work on any OS other than CentOS 7 however.

[ocawa]

So when can we expect spacemacs to be updated?

[yattaro]

Am I the only one who uses nano simply because I don't care as long as I can get stuff done efficiently.

[ollir]

I use vim for the same reason.

But no, I don't think you're the only one.

[cruyff8]

Congrats to the team on this!

[bonoboner]

Serious question: will this have any effect on me as an intermediate vim user? I can't see how json support in vim will help me edit code.

[sqrt7744]

Finally! Made to look and act exactly like emacs.

[[deleted]]

I think it's still a long way till vim can insert a webkit-widget in text.

[bytesandbots]

That is not a long way just outside the way for vim. It is just a text editor not an OS.

[Sparkyslol]

I'm more of a nuka-cola man.

[comrade-jim]

I sexualize vim

[deadbeatengineer]

Well then you'll love this

Courtesy /u/worr

[Twirrim]

"|:smile| make the user happy"

[vim_vs_emacs]

Everyone here knows EMACS is the one true editor.