Vim 7.4a ready for beta testing

Now for homebrew next hopefully :D

Quoted their website -

7.3 has more than 950 patches, that's too many! Time for a new (minor) release. The plan is to (1) improve Python support, (2) include a faster regexp engine and (3) include pending patches and fix bugs. A test version should be available end of May. The release happens when it appears to work well.

You know, I just realized that I've been working with vim for 3 years now and I'm not familiar with it either, haha! I guess I never thought it before. Can anyone give more details about this topic?

I'm not either familiar either, so I looked.

There were 28 days between the announcement of 7.3a and 7.3, 46 between 7.2a and 7.2, and 7 between 7.1a and 7. It took 45 days to go from 7's first beta to stable release.

For many of these, there were several beta releases, so there's a good chance we'll see a 7.4b or 7.4c. I would say that it certainly won't take more than two months before 7.4 is released and probably will take less than a month.

You can sign up for vim-announce here: http://www.vim.org/maillist.php.

Sources: 7.3a: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/lSlC6cUV5TY

7.3 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_announce/ZsAu_RU...

7.2a: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_multibyte/FVRKk5...

7.2: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_announce/LIlnHdk...

7.1a: http://vim.1045645.n5.nabble.com/Vim-version-7-1a-BETA-has-b...

7.1: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vimannounce/message/178

7: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vimannounce/message/161

7b (there was no 7a, apparently): http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vimannounce/message/153

I don't use anything except NERDTree. Is that close enough to vanilla to count?

Vanilla, because I never have any idea what plugins are going to be installed on the systems I touch (probably none). It's the same argument for learning vi. It's there everywhere. Similarly, it probably has no plugins.

I use vanilla vim as a handy lowest common denominator editor when working on whichever random system I happen to be on. Emacs is for when you want to customize, in my book.

> Does anyone even use Vim without plugins anymore?

I use vim for almost 20 years for everything except when I'm developing in java (but even then I use eclipse with a vi plugin).

And no plugins at all.

The only plugin I use is ctrl-p.

I have a very short .vimrc, and beyond that my only "plugin" is tmux. :-) For my Rails work, I run one vim in app/models, one in app/controllers, another in app/views, app/assets/stylesheets, and app/assets/javascripts, each in a separate tmux session. That's the right-hand terminal. In the left-hand terminal I have tmux sessions for git, the server log, a db connection, specs, and another miscellaneous vim session for migrations, config edits, Rake tasks, etc.

I use a separate xfce workspace for each client, arranged horizontally in one row. Sometimes I fill up five at a time. Keeping each project in a separate workspace gives me good isolation between them.

I don't really have anything against adding plugins, but with this setup I'm very fast already. I just glanced at Ctrl-P, and I'm not sure it'd add much. I'm pretty good at saying `:!grep -r foo ..` to search all of `app` whenever necessary.

If there were such a thing as a vim spellchecker that understood LaTeX, now that's a plugin I'd be interested in. . . .

Yes; I've been using Vim for nearly two decades now without plugins. I have a small .vimrc, but that's it.

The main reason I do so is that I frequently login into a variety of systems where I have no control over what version of vim is installed or what base packages are available. As such, even if I bothered to place the relevant plugins in my home directory, I may not be able to use them.

At this point in my life, I tend to stick with software that has the best defaults and requires minimal tweaking.

That makes it quick and relatively painless for me to recreate my development environment wherever I need to.

I use vanilla vim only when I have to. I admire these guys who can do with vanilla vim. The plugin I cannot do without is NERDTree. That should be integrated into Vim itself.

I've used nvi for over 15 years. Also use a small vim install here and there. Also have done several talks on grokking ex mode and regex at local vim user groups.

In my early days when first learning the system I used ee, a HP public domain pico clone which is distributed on *BSD systems for new users.

The original Berkeley UNIX had a modded vi named edit which was aliased to ee and while normal vi operation was aliased to e. I'm assuming ee stood for easyeditor back then.

The video you linked states in its about section that nvi is not customizable. This is simply not true. It's just as easy to script as ed and ex.

Though Bostic never included lisp support like the Joy's editor for extending vi with the shell has always been the main UNIX way of doing it. The classic tutorial to show someone how to extend nvi is to have them do external spell checking with one of the many spell programs.

I have a bunch of plugins installed, but only use ctrl-p regularly. gitgutter is also handy, but I could easily live without it.

I couldn't live without tabbar - https://github.com/vim-scripts/TabBar

I did this too, but I'm using the Vintageous plugin which has very good vi emulation. Not everything, of course, but it's got some momentum, has a ton of features already(most of the ones I know by muscle memory anyway) and gets frequent updates.

So far it feels awesome, this modal editing with modern features, but I haven't used Sublime Text 3 enough to form a good opinion on why I like it yet. Mostly, I'm like "that minimap is pretty cool!". But I'm also using it like vim, so it's not like it's all sublime anyway.