Vim 7 - Hurray

Now this was Murphy at its best. I sit down to pimp my VIM and blog about it and three days later, Bram releases Version 7 of Vim, rendering my updates partly irrelevant.

 


 


But Vim 7 is really cool. A lot of new features, some of them really useful.

Spell checking

Vim 7 includes spell checking. This was already available in earlier releases, but you had to install it separately, now it is included in the distribution. But you still have to install the dictionaries, which are reused from the OpenOffice.org project, separately. Vim 7 provides an install-mechanism, which didn’t work on my Windows XP machine. Therefore I just downloaded the necessary files and put them in the spell-directory of %vimfiles.

Vim 7 Spellcheck

What I really like about the spell checking is, that it supports several languages in parallel. So by stating „set spelllang=de_at,en” in my _vimrc file, I can check for German and English typos. VERY convenient.

Extended Highlighting

With „set cursorline” and „set cursorcolumn” in your _vimrc you get a really useful highlighting of both the current line and the current column. As I am always getting lost in longer lines, the highlight current column feature is a real time saver.

Vim7 Highlighting

Tabs

Another nice new feature are „Tabs”. The name almost says it all – now you can open several files in Vim, but you do not have to split the Vim-window or cycle through them, but you get nice and shiny Tabs, at least in gVim, as you know them from Opera, Firefox or, if they ever release it, Internet Explorer 7.

Vim7 Tabs

Personally, I prefer the new Tabs over the old way of splitting the screen. But there is still one feature missing. In The Windows Explorer, I can say „Open in new Vim” or „Open in existing Vim”, but there is no option to say „Open as new Tab in existing Vim”. Dan Curran used to offer a modified gvimext.dll file to have the Windows Explorer right-click menu option „Open is single Vim” open multiple files using the new Vim70 tabs as opposed to using buffers. Unfortunately, this file is no longer available. If you would like to have it, drop me a line, I will e-mail it to you.
Update 20061202: There is a better solution available now!

Other new Features

There are lots of other new features in Vim 7. There is Intelligent completion (OmniCompletion aka. Intellisense), the file browser is syntax highlighted, Bram added a built in grep, improved Unicode support and much more. Read the release-notes, take a look at „Vim 7 - the graphical introduction” or this Screencast – it is definitely worth it.

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„Leyrers Online Pamphlet“ ist die persönliche Website von mir, Martin Leyrer. Die hier veröffentlichten Beiträge spiegeln meine Ideen, Interessen, meinen Humor und fallweise auch mein Leben wider.
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