Vim 8.0 released

[Posted September 12, 2016 by corbet]

The Vim editor project is celebrating its 8.0 release. "This the first major Vim release in ten years. There are interesting new features, many small improvements and lots of bug fixes." New features include asynchronous I/O, jobs, a package system, GTK+ 3 support, and more.

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 13, 2016 11:06 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (5 responses)

Damn there's some good stuff here. Async I/O in particular should make a number of more complex plugins significantly less painful (and in some cases, less impossible). To be honest I didn't realise Vim was getting this level of development.

Also:
>When no vimrc file is found ... Vim no longer starts up in Vi compatible mode
And there was much rejoicing.

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 13, 2016 13:50 UTC (Tue) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link] (1 responses)

Does the new asynchronous support mean that something like neomake is now possible?

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 13, 2016 14:18 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

It looks like it should do, although obviously plugins will need to be updated to support it, which could take a long time.

I'm also hoping for things like being able to run pep8 when saving, which currently blocks the UI for too long to be a realistic option unless you're running on a super powerful machine.

Actually there are quite a few checkers that I have running at save, where blocking for a second or two isn't too awful, which perhaps will be able to run near-continuously in the glorious async future.

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 14, 2016 12:02 UTC (Wed) by jpnp (guest, #63341) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think it was, until, frustrated by the fact that patches for features such as async were being turned down, Neovim forked the code and set about some major refactoring as well as adding new features. This element of competition does seem to have spurred the development of the original vim on.

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 14, 2016 12:18 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Not to mention that Neovim, IIRC, dropped support for…obscure things like EBCDIC, old OS support, uses things like C99, etc. and is apparently a nicer place to develop in (the few times I've been in the Vim codebase were, thankfully, brief).

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 14, 2016 23:19 UTC (Wed) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]

The release notes for Vim 8.0 mention that support for OS/2, MS-DOS and 16 bit Windows (95 and older) has been removed. The reason given for DOS removal is that "Vim doesn't fit in memory" :D

Soon to come...

Posted Sep 13, 2016 15:14 UTC (Tue) by cruff (subscriber, #7201) [Link]

Looks like Vim has enough features to write emulators now, perhaps we can have a Vim based QEMU to host containers. :-)

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 13, 2016 21:08 UTC (Tue) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (6 responses)

Anybody try this on muti-gigabyte files yet? Large file support (as in, quickly loading and navigating them, not just loading them) has been the one feature I've found in proprietary editors that I haven't found an open source match for...

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 14, 2016 21:07 UTC (Wed) by mrjk (subscriber, #48482) [Link] (5 responses)

I agree!
We have all sorts of logs and journal files and no Open Source editor works as well as proprietory stuff.

I never thought I would be looking at Gig size files but I seem to be doing it on a weekly basis at this point.

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 15, 2016 11:03 UTC (Thu) by ribalda (subscriber, #58945) [Link] (1 responses)

May I ask what proprietary editor do you use for that?

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 28, 2016 6:19 UTC (Wed) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

The only one I've used that seems to work well on large (100GB pr more) is EmEditor. Haven't had to touch it for a couple years - it was windows only, and I haven't had to deal with a windows server in a while.

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 15, 2016 11:12 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

Not an editor, but have you tried less?

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 16, 2016 21:27 UTC (Fri) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

I've always found emacs to work well on relatively large files -- even large files that are partially binary. I use it on 1GB files fairly routinely. Even if do an operation which you realize is going to take too long, it allows you to abort operations with control-g.

"less", on the other hand, I would not really recommend. It likes to do things like synchronously hang to count the number of lines, which is annoying -- although you can control-c to stop it. Emacs does a pretty good job of avoiding hanging to compute a line number in the first place, while still giving line numbers when it can do so without undue slowdown.

less also doesn't work so hot on partially binary files: its wrapping/repainting algorithm gets reaaaaaaaly slow if there aren't linebreaks often enough in the file. And its search function also doesn't always seem to always find things it ought to in binary files. Emacs has neither of these issues.

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 15, 2016 20:03 UTC (Thu) by donio (guest, #94) [Link]

Emacs has vlf mode for this: https://github.com/m00natic/vlfi

It's available in melpa.

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 13, 2016 23:04 UTC (Tue) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

Wow. Congratulations, Vim devs! :wq!

Vim 8.0 released

Posted Sep 17, 2016 5:48 UTC (Sat) by gilboa (guest, #23856) [Link]

async files, gtk 3.0, vlf support (major sour point when opening huge log files).
Looks like a very impressive release.

Good to see vim developers have picked up the pace.

- Gilboa