from Hacker News

Vim 8.0 released

by laqq3 on 9/12/16, 12:39 PM with 299 comments

  • by znpy on 9/12/16, 1:11 PM

    Given the occasion, and given that vim is charity-ware software (http://charityware.info/), it would be cool to have some sort of HN-wide donation to ICCF (http://iccf-holland.org/).

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

    It seems that you can send bitcoins too: http://iccf-holland.org/bitcoin.html

    Imho just mentioning HN in the payment description would be okay :)

  • by thedz on 9/12/16, 1:07 PM

    Notable improvements:

    - Async /Io

    - Async Jobs

    - "Packages", which allow easier built-in bundling of plugins

    I'm pretty excited for this release! I've been using Neovim for several months now, but really great to see mainline Vim get these (IMO long overdue) enhancements.

  • by kozikow on 9/12/16, 1:14 PM

    I moved to http://wikemacs.org/wiki/Evil and I am happy with the transition. Spacemacs seems to be a good choice nowadays.

    Magit and org-mode are worth it.

  • by leejo on 9/12/16, 1:12 PM

  • by juandazapata on 9/12/16, 2:26 PM

    Thanks for the work done here. I'm not a VIM user anymore (I use Spacemacs now), but it opened my eyes/mind to what is a professional code editor. After using VIM, using any other editor feels like programming in Notepad. VIM you'll always be in my heart.

  • by eof on 9/12/16, 2:26 PM

    I've used vim, pretty heavily customized, for almost a decade now. It seems to me perfect, and if not perfect, I just change it so it's perfect.

    I've been using pathogen for a while for plugins..

    I will happily give 8.0 a try, but I have never used such perfect software such as vim (and I also don't follow its dev cycle at all) I am really, really surprised a new version came out. I figured I'd be using the same vim until keyboards were completely out of style.

  • by nerdponx on 9/12/16, 1:01 PM

    Is there feature/API parity between Vim 8 and NeoVim? I would hate to see the community fragment and disintegrate.

  • by danielrm26 on 9/12/16, 3:48 PM

    I submit my Vim Primer for your consideration.

    https://danielmiessler.com/study/vim/

    Going to download and see what Prezto stuff breaks when I upgrade.

  • by weinzierl on 9/12/16, 7:10 PM

    Bram will give a talk about Vim 8.0 on Saturday at Vimfest in Berlin. I'm looking forward to be there.

    [1] http://vimfest.org/#agenda

  • by HugoDaniel on 9/12/16, 1:59 PM

    I moved to nvi. Feels good to go back a notch and realise that you actually don't need all of the other stuff to produce quality code.

  • by tombert on 9/12/16, 1:52 PM

    This is pretty rad. I've used Neovim for a few months now, but I always wanted to keep using the "official" editor due to it's support on pretty much every OS.

    Async is basically the reason I used NeoVim, so it feels good to come back.

  • by mbgaxyz on 9/12/16, 5:25 PM

    Here is the md5 checksum for the Windows binary (it's not shown on the website): 2ea0e00657f0cabf2f314b8a8f794271

    Windows: ftp//ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/pc/gvim80.exe

    MD5SUMS: ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/pc/MD5SUMS

  • by pacuna on 9/13/16, 2:27 AM

    I've tried nvim, sublime's vintage mode, atom's vim mode, visual code's vim mode, jet brains' vim mode, spacemacs and always end up going back to vim. I know it's far from being perfect. All of those other alternatives have features I wish vim had but at the end there's just no comparison against the flow you can get with something like tmux/vim/plugins

  • by dominotw on 9/12/16, 1:13 PM

    anyway to get this on osx now

    Readme seems incomplete

    https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/READMEdir/README_mac....

  • by Lio on 9/12/16, 4:07 PM

    I didn't see anything in the release notes but does anyone know if Vim 8 adds true colour terminal support?

    (I realise that NeoVim has this.)

  • by limaoscarjuliet on 9/12/16, 2:58 PM

    The biggest power of vi for me is about it running on pretty much anything. If it has a keyboard and a screen, it has vi.

    While I usually stick to I, A, N+G, Shitf-ZZ and :q! only, I appreciate the effort and keeping vi alive and well.

    Big thanks!

  • by nulagrithom on 9/12/16, 2:14 PM

    Looks like there's a new :smile command

    http://vimhelp.appspot.com/index.txt.html#%3Asmile

  • by typon on 9/12/16, 3:10 PM

    Neovim for life. On my Mac it performs so much better than Macvim.

  • by owaislone on 9/12/16, 9:23 PM

    Great! I've been using neovim for the last year and it is pretty awesome. Hope 8.0 bring similar improvements to Vim as well. Hopefully, they'll merge back some day but even if they don't, I think neovim is here to stay. It has had amazing progress and so many contributions.

  • by Tehnix on 9/13/16, 3:18 AM

    Kudos for finally getting async support! :)

    That said, I feel like this is a perfect example showing off that the best way (or a at least a very good one) out of stagnation of a piece of software is competition. VIM was dead in the water for a very long time (aync support looking at you), which is but one of the reasons NeoVIM was created, in turn sparking VIM to actually get off its laurels.

    I can't help but draw parallels to the Haskell community with stack and cabal-install, to the people that might be familiar with that situation.

    Anyhow, I guess I just wanted to also thank NeoVIM for pushing some life into VIM again, besides having it more or less in maintenance mode.

  • by hoodoof on 9/13/16, 3:03 AM

    I made the terrible error of trying to use vim as an IDE when I was learning to program. Honestly I think it set my progress back 75%.

    Don't get me wrong, I use vim all the time cause it's there on any machine I log in to, but I found I was MUCH more productive when I paid for a good IDE for development.

    And YES I tried using all the plugins to make vim into an IDE. That was half the problem.

  • by hossbeast on 9/12/16, 11:23 PM

    Just gave neovim a try, and my favorite thing so far is that this command works (but does not with vim and has always bothered me)

    $ find foo | xargs nvim

  • by daveloyall on 9/12/16, 3:28 PM

    In case you were looking for the Changelog: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vim/vim/master/runtime/doc...

  • by fiatjaf on 9/12/16, 1:16 PM

    Finally a "Save to Dropbox" feature!

  • by Scarbutt on 9/12/16, 10:43 PM

    Does this new features means that vim can finally have lisp REPLs a la emacs?

  • by yaasita on 9/13/16, 1:31 AM

    I created docker image.

    docker run -it -e TERM=screen-256color yaasita/vim:8.0 vim

  • by Zardoz84 on 9/12/16, 2:37 PM

    Ok, and when would be for Cygwin ?

  • by dcu on 9/12/16, 12:47 PM

    you can find the release notes here: http://vimhelp.appspot.com/version8.txt.html

  • by freewizard on 9/12/16, 3:07 PM

    the linked appspot site is 503 over-quota. anyone can change the url to

    https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/LaYdHDNzJcU

    or

    http://www.vim.org

  • by qwertyuiop924 on 9/12/16, 2:55 PM

    Oh Vim...

    If you're going to lightweight and vi-like, than do that. If you're going to go the Emacs route (and if you're adding async, packaging, and lambdas, make no mistake, you're starting in the steps to building an inferior Emacs), than get a half-decent extension language. Or just up and die. We don't need a Vi clone that does the Emacs thing, we've got Evil/Spacemacs for that.