Vim 7 !! Launched

Finally after a long wait Vim 7 was launched on May 8, 2006. (Announcement)

The latest version boasts of many cool additions and improvements. The best one being the new tabbed interface and in built spell check. I installed the 7+ MB installations on my PC as soon as I could get my hands on it. Let us say that now I love vim7 more than its previous version.

Tabs - long due overhaul
With desktop/taskbar space becoming a precious commodity, tabbed interface was bound to come to Vim. Though it took some time to come. To enable tab support you need to start vim with -p argument. After that things are cool. Working with tabs is relatively simple. Its as easy as using split.

Use
tabnew - to open new tab
tabf filename - to open a file in a new tab
Ctrl + PgUp, Ctrl+PgDn - Browse between tabs
That’s it, there are many more options check the help files, but these will get you started. There is nothing against this feature, except if the default behavior of a file opening in a new vim instance could somehow be changed to new tab (like in editPlus on PC), it will make life more beautiful :)

One more thing, maybe a bug :) If you are at ':' prompt, then clicking on tabs will not work :(

Spell Check - Yes it works
The spell-check feature which is off by default does an awesome job. It detects spelling mistakes and highlights them with cute curly lines on the fly, just the way MSWord does, it somehow looks better when Vim does that. The default dictionary is very comprehensive. Adding and deleting words in temporary 'internal-dictionary' or the spell file is also easy. Get started..

set spell - enable spel check
set nospell - disable spell check
]s - jump to next mistake
[s - jump to previous mistake
z= - suggests correction

Auto Complete alias Intellisense (TM)
Since Vim does not want to mess with the trademark owners it calls its 'Intellisense' Omni-Completion. I will not lie; I couldn’t get it to work. With all the options and everything set I could not get vim to do auto-completion in my C code file. Will try again and update if things get better.

Though it’s simply Ctrl+X Ctrl+O in insert mode that does auto-completion.

We got some other cool features like parenthesis match, undo branch history, remote file operations, and internal grep.
I am writing a plugin for vim, It seems that new features like Lists, dictionaries and Function Pointers are going to be usefull there :)

All in all it will be a popular vim upgrade.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Like ur work buddy!! Keep it up!! Arpita

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