Vim 9.2

[jasonhansel]

I'm glad to see that Vim9 continues to make progress. The center of gravity may have shifted somewhat towards Neovim, but the Neovim ecosystem currently seems targeted towards people who want something more IDE-like.

One question is: will more plugin authors move to Vim9Script? It seems that Neovim users have generally moved towards Lua-based plugins, so there's less of a motivation to produce plugins that support both Neovim and Vim9.

[rustyhancock]

I'm not the target for your question (I distribute 0 plugins).

But Lua support in Neovim is the primary reason I moved over from Emacs. Elisp and Vim are both so heart sink for me.

That said I'd have preferred something other than Lua if I had the choice.

[sodapopcan]

I love vim9script and write most of my plugins in it now unless I want something to work in the other vim as well, of course. Really happy to see it evolving and I'm particularly happy that tuple support has landed!

[srik]

> For over 30 years, Vim has been "Charityware," supporting children in Kibaale, Uganda. Following the passing of Bram Moolenaar, the ICCF Holland foundation was dissolved […] and its remaining funds were transferred to ensure continued support for the Kibaale project. […] Vim remains Charityware. We encourage users to continue supporting the needy children in Uganda through this new transition.

I settled on vim for its technical merits but Bram using his goodwill to fund a charity like this for so long always made me feel good about my choice.

[jdsnape]

I used to work for a large enterprise, and tried to get vim ‘approved’ for internal use. I remember this charityware clause caused our legal department to get tied up in all sorts of arguments about how we could be opening ourselves to liability if we used it without donating. It was my first lesson in navigating large company processes.

In the end I just kept quiet about the fact that it ships in all the Linux package repos.

(Just to be clear, I fully support what Bram did here)

[bko]

Do I understand it correctly, but people donating to Vim, presumably for the support of the software, have their donations passed along to a charity supporting children in Uganda?

[gfiorav]

As a die-hard vim fan, I feel bitter-sour saying that I switched to nvim. Honestly, I think the vim maintainers should find a way to merge in nvim.

[e-khadem]

I think not adding new features frequently and keeping everything stable and working in the long-term is also meritorious. Vim is the same on my local machine, on my rpi, and on an Ubuntu 20.04 VM that I use for some proprietary software.

Also, I cannot think of an extension / new feature that makes sense as a part of Vim (if I want something more, I want a lot more. I don't want Vim to do a lot more, for the sake of simplicity and conformity, that's a job for vscode with Vim extension).

At the same time I wouldn't object to someone adding features to this program. But they have to try really hard to convince me to start relying on that feature (I wouldn't, because I would miss it on Ubuntu 20.04 and I will forget how I used to work without that feature).

I tried nvim a few years ago and honestly didn't find anything advantageous there. But since I had `:sh` in muscle memory and it was a bit (very?) different there I gave up on nvim.

[sodapopcan]

I don't think that will ever happen. They have already diverged in key ways. I'm more than happy with vim9 and where it is going, personally.

[andrewla]

I have also switched to nvim, but every release I consider moving back.

Honestly a lot of this is that I hate Lua. With so much of the infrastructure moving in that direction it's basically unavoidable. XDG support was honestly one of the things holding me back; I'm glad that this is finally fixed.

[3eb7988a1663]

NeoVim tossed significant amounts of legacy code (eg 8.3 filename support) and greatly improved out of the box default configuration. You cannot merge the two without upsetting one camp or the other. Vim wants to continue to be a stable platform that runs on 40 year old hardware. NeoVIM wanted to ditch the cruft that no longer makes applies.

[synergy20]

I use vim and nvim in parallel, just ask init.nvim to read from ~/.vimrc, all is good

[sigzero]

Has neovim settles on a UI yet?

[einpoklum]

I am a lay user or vim. I use it daily for editing text files and a bit of code, but I always found the plugins and the scripting language rather daunting. There are different, conflicting, plugin management systems; and of course there's the scripting language that's vim-specific, and the few times I tried to delve into this stuff, I quickly found myself in over my head.

So - on the occasion of VIm 9.2 coming out - do people have a recommendation for a gentle path to "leveling up" one's VIm skills and engagement?

[skydhash]

There are the Practical Vim[0] and Modern Vim[1] by D. Neil

And the VimL Primer[2] by B. Klein

But Vim is a whole culture that starts with ed(1), the standard editor. You do edit based on line numbers and regex addressing and commands. Then there was ex(1) that added more features. vi(1) added a `visual` mode to ex(1), and some commands can now be done in relation to the position of the cursor. Vim is the improved version of vi(1), a lot more commands and a scripting language.

The plugin system is similar to everything that was unix at that time, relying on a variable like $PATH. Any path added to that variable (runtimepath for vim), should follow some patterns for subdirectories and the file will be loaded according to a certain logic. Plugin managers actually manage that variable and do a few things aside (isolating plugins, downloading from forges,...)

[0]: https://pragprog.com/titles/dnvim2/practical-vim-second-edit...

[1]: https://pragprog.com/titles/modvim/modern-vim/

[2]: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-viml-primer/9781680...

[mystifyingpoi]

Yes, switch to Neovim. Seriously, no sarcasm. You can import your existing .vimrc at first, if you even care. I highly recommend kickstart or some other simple config scaffold.

[svilen_dobrev]

do you really need that?

the scripting language is.. okay, but u have to try doing something practical in it, to get a feeling.

see my vimrc, being updating it since ~2000

https://github.com/svilendobrev/svd_bin/blob/master/qini/_vi...

[computerfriend]

Strange that there's no v9.2 tag in https://github.com/vim/vim/tags.

[chrisbra80]

Oopps, missed that. Now there is a v9.2.0 tag and a v9.2.0000 tag

[c0balt]

The relevant release commit is, https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/e7e21018fc0b60c153c8e668f6... (at time of writing, two hours ago).

It seems they didn't publish the tag yet though.

[actinium226]

But where are the AI features?? Gonna get left behind!

Only joking of course, actually quite refreshing to see a new version announcement of something this major without any AI nonsense.

[user3939382]

I made a vim extension where you describe the edit/action you want in natural language, and my ollama model thats trained on books like Practical Vim returns the key sequence and you can press e to execute without leaving vim. So you get automation help but also learn the syntax.

[LexiMax]

> But where are the AI features?? Gonna get left behind!

Obviously vim doesn't need AI, but one feature I really wish vim had was native support for multiple cursors.

It's the feature that lured me away to Sublime Text in the first place many years ago, and it's a pre-requisite for pretty much every editor I use these days, from VSCode to Zed.

There are plugins, but multicursor is such a powerful force-multiplier that I think a native implementation would benefit.

[michaelcampbell]

Vim and its ilk have plenty of AI.

Actual Intelligence. It's connected to fingers/hands/arms/torso that is using it.

[guerrilla]

I agree and I know what you're saying, but I'm pretty curious: how are people using AI with vim? I've seen some scripts for ollama but what are most people doing?

[another_twist]

Vim is a ironically far better suited to agectic coding than any other ide in my opinion.

[kgwxd]

I was happy with VSCode after decades of Vim because it felt light enough out of the box until Copilot starting showing up in every nook and cranny of the damn thing. I switch back to Vim last year.

[joelthelion]

As a side note, vim works great with Ai plug-ins.

[comex]

The announcement itself looks potentially AI-assisted, judging by the bulleted list style and redundant text under the "Charity: Transition to Kuwasha" section. But maybe some people just write that way.

[dmd]

:please exit vim now

[aljgz]

AISREIR

AI Should Rewrite Everything In Rust

[jmclnx]

Congratulations!

>Full support for the Wayland UI

I really hope they never deprecate X11 support :) I doubt they will, but if they do, it will leave the BSDs without a good alternative.

[zenoprax]

Unless I'm misunderstanding the problem, Wayland is available on FreeBSD.

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland

[bee_rider]

What is “the Wayland UI,” anyway? Is this like that vim gui program that some Windows users use?

Usually vim runs I’m the terminal, so I don’t have any worries about losing support. But other people have other use-cases, of course…

[hleszek]

Why would they do that? When I started learning VIM more than 20 years ago, one of the main reason was that it (or vi) was already present and installed in every possible Linux system.

[wpollock]

There's always TECO! <Joking>

[wraith_cz]

I love Vim. I have been using it since the days of DOS and appreciate its amazing compatibility. Since those DOS days, I have been using my vimrc, which I am constantly improving. Today, it is 83 KB and still works, which is fantastic! Over the years, I have tried various other editors and IDEs, including neovim, but nothing beats Vim. Today, I know that I will be with it until I die. It is an amazing piece of software. With version 9.2, it has improved again, and I am delighted with the vertical panel and autocompletion in the search bar. The only thing missing for complete perfection is full-fledged modal dialog boxes.

[dkga]

Delighted to see vim continuing.

[simoncrypta]

After many years being interested, I finally invest a good amount of time learning vim properly. Thanks to AI, I got more time to learn in between request and it become painfully slow to use IDE or ask AI simple change. To me the agentic workflow make it even more valuable to learn vim since I can fix and iterate on small details way faster.

[PlatoIsADisease]

I think with AI, its eliminated my need for Vim. Sorry to say.

I was such a proponent.

If I'm entirely reading code for bugs, then using voice to text to the AI to correct the problem... What typing am I doing?

Still love the idea of Vim.

[_0xdd]

I love this editor. The return on investment in learning vim is incredible. I'm not a programmer or even really "in" tech, but when my colleagues see me chew through a document using MacVim they're astounded.

[Bulbasaur2015]

> Vim now adheres to the XDG Base Directory Specification,

cool

[super_mario]

Congratulations to Christian and all the contributors on another vim milestone. Thank you all. I am so thrilled to see vim development continuing.

As early vim (vi imitation) user on Amiga, I can't imagine living without it.

[k3vinw]

> The MS-Windows GUI now supports native dark mode for the menu and title bars, along with improved fullscreen support and higher-quality toolbar icons.

Congratulations on the new release! Looking forward to applying these awesome improvements.

[_0xdd]

Couldn't have come at a better time for those who are affected by their IT departments removing access to Notepad++.

[laladrik]

You know, that new inline Vim's diff algorithm looks really tempting. I wish I had it in my Neovim

[wvlia5]

There was a time when Bram Moleenar refused to do any updates to Vim, until Neovim came along.

[mmooss]

Bram Moolenaar updated Vim periodically for decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)#Versions

The complaint, including from the Neovim founder, was that Moolenar rejected their update.

[saila]

Now that he's no longer with us, I don't think comments like this are necessary.

[riffraff]

this is a richer changeset than I would have expected, I'm glad to see that.

[notorandit]

Wayland support for a terminal editor?

Woot?

[Biganon]

Maybe read the very next sentence?

[svilen_dobrev]

i have been using vim since v4 (1999?), but in the last year+ - maybe since v9? - there's some weird defect happening only once in a while:

While walking around a file with keyboard, sometimes a random line's indent is removed - that is, text goes left-flushed. AND it's not a tracked change that can be UNDOne - as if it never happened / always has-been-so. Have not been able to correlate this to any other thing. It happens like once a few days, very rarely it might happen twice within minutes. Sometimes i notice that, sometimes i don't and (luckily) python screams of broken indentation. If the file isn't deeply nested python.. good luck.

Has anyone "achieved" such a thing?

[teo_zero]

I'd bet it's some plugin. I have a vanilla Vim and never noticed anything like that.

[Pay08]

Maybe make a bug report?

[hackerbrother]

Hey man, you’re not blocked. Read you loud and clear. Happy Valentine’s Day to you and yours.

[mcswell]

In case you're wondering: I'm not blocked in this thread, but I was blocked in a thread about ICE. I told them to thaw out.

[worldsavior]

YES. Wayland support.

[TristanDaCunha]

Should stop and help with neovim

[freedomben]

This is the perennial argument that IMHO is based on a fallacy. If the vim people suddenly stopped working on vim, it doesn't mean all their effort would go to neovim. People work on what they want to work on in open source. Also the two projects have very different goals/philosophies. The code bases have also gotten pretty different in architecture because neovim did a monstrous refactor. It's open source working as intended that we have both.

[benatkin]

Could say the same thing about people working on neovim