The long-awaited seventh version of one of the best text editors on the planet, Vim, is finally out!
OK, I’m a nerd. Fine, whatever.
The killer features I’m excited about?
- Branching Undo. You don’t realize the usefulness of something like this until you write a full paragraph of your blog, then undo it. Then you write a replacement, including multiple undos, and realize that the previous version was just better. Now you can go back to that undo, branch to it, and re-do the branched undo! Sweet!
- Built-in completion for the programming languages I use most. I’ve been using scripts to do this a long time, but it’s nice to see intelligent parsing and placement built-in.
- Tabbed editing. Any user of Firefox can tell you, tabs make you more productive, period.
- Improved Unicode support. Those of us who use Vim as our editor for gmail, and happen to want to use, oh, say, gnupg, will appreciate this.
- Integrated browsing of remote directories, tar archives, etc.
Anyway, I’m stoked. I use vim at least 2-3 hours every workday (usually more!), and improvements are welcome.