It's pretty cool that vim has had the same lead developer running the project for nearly 20 years.
It's also pretty cool how he asks for donations to be sent to nonprofits instead of himself.
I know this is irrelevant to the new release, but I think it's great that he still keeps it going after 20 years without any monetary gain (at least directly from the project).
Where the money goes depends on whether he has a job or not. Currently he works at Google, so it goes to a non-profit, but it has gone to him in the past.
Persistent undo is my favorite new feature. The ability to close vim, reopen a file later, and then have all of the undo history still available is awesome. (Alternatively, I used to suspend vim instead of actually quit.)
To turn on persistent undo, I created a new directory called ~/.undo to store all of the undo history so that my working directories wouldn't get cluttered.
Then in .vimrc, I add:
I am happy to see the'relativenumber' option patch make it.
Quote from :h relativenumber
Show the line number relative to the line with the cursor in front of each line. Relative line numbers help you use the |count| you can precede some vertical motion commands (e.g. j k + -) with, without having to calculate it yourself. Especially useful in combination with other commands (e.g. y d c < > gq gw =).
How did you achieve that? Mine didn't, and doing "Check for updates" in the MacVim says I'm already at the latest version. I'm at "7.2 stable 1.2/33.3".
In case you didn't know, Vim already had undo "trees". My mind was BLOWN when I discovered this: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_32.html --
Never again accidentally lose work by accidentally breaking your redo change!
The online docs are still 7.2, so I had to dig into the source for a link to the new persistent undo/redo docs (search for "undo-persistence"):
I'm writing a new text editor and I spent an inordinate amount of time on the undo system. I never realized how many things the choice of undo implementation would affect.
But I did come to the conclusion that Emacs' default undo system is where it's at. Every modification should be undoable, including undos. Once you understand how it works, there's no longer a need for trees and the complexity that brings.
I can tell you a bit about how I implemented the same system in my editor.
It's quite simple if you think of every operation as a function that modifies the document. As you do something, a function that reverses those changes is pushed onto an undo stack. This incudes when you hit the "undo" button.
So if my document state looks like this:
start->A->B->C
where an arrow is a state change, my Undo stack will look like:
U0<-U1<-U2
Where function U2 will get me from C to B, U1 from B to A, and U0 from A to the original document.
If I hit undo, that's a modification, so the state history looks like:
start->A->B->C->B
And my undo stack gets the "un-undo" pushed on the top, and looks like:
U0<-U1<-U2<-U3
So U3, when executed, brings me from the second state B back to state C. I'll never lose anything because every state I've ever seen in the document is implicitly stored in the undo stack.
If you're wondering how pushing an un-undo function on top of the undo stack doesn't prevent you from going beyond one level of undo, it's a simple trick; there is an undo stack pointer that decrements every time you hit "undo" and resets on any non-undo action. This is why in emacs you used to have to "do something else" like type a character to break the undo chain and re-visit more recent states.
It's something in the line of every change is a transaction. A redo is a replay of a transaction. An undo is not exactly a rollback but a reverse of the change and also a new transaction. You can undo a transaction in the past by reaplying later transactions. Makes me think a bit about Operational Transforms but I couldn't synthesizes my precise thoughts on that.
I saw you have experience with Haskell, have you seen Yi? http://yi-editor.blogspot.com/ It has an Emacs and Vim frontend, but is far from being finished.
Yes, it is. That's an extremely old version I wrote as a "let's see if I can do this" project. You can see the newer one by browsing the subversion repository, which unfortunately is broken until I commit the fix tonight.
I'm working on integrating it with Google docs so that you can work on your documents using a vi/emacs-like editor, which is extensible just like emacs except using javascript rather than elisp.
I hadn't seen yi, but it looks very similar to what I want to do, which is combine the best of vi and emacs into a new editor. I'm particularly interested in decent web-based editors, however; the implementation language is secondary.
Thank you thank you thank you for linking to this. I also use both editors (daily), and Emacs' undo system is easily among its worst and most annoying features, while Vim's undo system is among its best. The documentation at the top of undo-tree.el spells out exactly why this is the case. This library makes it all better.
Me too, but I'm getting a "E319: Sorry, the command is not available in this version" message when trying the new :lua* commands with the Windows version from the self-installing executable.
EDIT: Ah, the binary distribution is compiled with -lua (see :version). Cloning the Hg repository now...
As a long-time vim users and short-time Visual Studio user, I've found viemu to be a nice addition but frustrating to use. It conflicts with VS2010's keyboard shortcuts, and I've found myself doing the "random typing OMG what did I just do" thing fairly often. I hadn't done that in vim for over a decade.
Maybe it's just that viemu for VS2010 has only just come out recently, and may still need some tweaking. Long term, it's probably a great tool.
THIS. Get comfortable with moving from command to insert mode and back, moving around using the keyboard, and basic commands like delete, change and search (/). See how to combine these. From there, you're doing everything from the keyboard and learning new little shortcuts all the time.
It's also pretty cool how he asks for donations to be sent to nonprofits instead of himself.
I know this is irrelevant to the new release, but I think it's great that he still keeps it going after 20 years without any monetary gain (at least directly from the project).