Vim 8.2 released: advanced text editor
Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor ‘Vi’, with a more complete feature set. It’s useful whether you’re already using vi or using a different editor. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems.
Vim is often called a “programmer’s editor,” and so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It’s not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing an email to editing configuration files.
Despite what the above comic suggests, Vim can be configured to work in a very simple (Notepad-like) way, called evim or Easy Vim.
Changelog v8.2
The main new feature of Vim 8.2 is support for popup windows. These can be used to display text on top of other windows and are very flexible: they can be positioned relative to text, at an absolute position or just in the middle of the screen. The size can be fixed or can adjust to fit the text. A “zindex” value specifies what popup window goes on top of others.
The popup window can react to user input. This works with a filter callback. The filter can handle a few keys and pass on the rest, or it can consume all the keys, thus grabbing focus. This allows for very flexible use of the popups.
Popup windows can be used for many purposes, here are a few examples:
- When a background build finishes a message popup can show “Build finished successfully” on top of the screen, without interfering with what the user is working on.
- When using Insert mode completion extra info for a completion item can be displayed in an info popup.
- A list of choices can be displayed, where the user selects an entry with keys or with the mouse.
- While typing a function call, a popup can show the documentation and the list of arguments, just next to where the user is typing. The new text properties feature can be used to highlight types.
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