Vim News

[2026-05-19]

[2026-05-13]

[2026-02-14]

[2025-11-06]

[2025-10-28]

[2025-08-27]

[2025-07-22]

[2025-07-16]

[2025-06-28]

[2025-05-28]

We're excited to share that the Vim project now provides daily ARM64 binaries through the vim-win32-installer repository !

These builds make it easier than ever to run Vim on ARM64 Windows devices.

Happy Vimming!

[2025-05-16]

Vim patch 9.1.1391 adds support for a vertical tabpanel.

Vim patch v9.1.1391 brings support for a vertical tabpanel. This is similar to the tabline feature, but instead of using a single horizontally line to show all tabpages, Vim will use a vertical tabpanel.

You can customize how this should look like when to display the tabpanel and what exactly should be shown using the various tabpanel options ('tabpanel', 'tabpanelopt' and 'showtabpanel' option.)

You can find some examples of how this changes, when looking at the pictures provided at the pull request 17263. This change has been contributed by Naruhiko Nishino, thanks for improving Vim!
Happy Vimming!

[2025-03-27]

Vim patch 9.1.1243 brings some nice improvements to the vim diff highlighting.

It is now possible to enable character- and word diffs. This brings it closer to other diff highlighting tools like meld and Visual Studio Code.

You can enable this by setting the new suboption "inline" for the "diffopt" setting like this: :set diffopt+=inline:word or :set diffopt+=inline:char

You can find some examples of how this changes, when looking at the pictures provided at the pull request 16881. This change has been contributed by Yee Cheng Chin, thanks for improving Vim!

[2025-03-23]

Vim patch 9.1.1232 brings support for the Tuple data type to Vim Script.

A tuple is immutable and uses less memory than a List data type, therefore being a bit more efficient than a list type and it is now available in Vim Script thanks to Yegappan Lakshmanan. A huge thanks for doing this work!

Please see the extensive help for the documentation.

[2025-02-14]

On February 25th, we celebrate Free Software and the incredible communities that make it possible. And what better occasion to express our gratitude to the Vim, Neovim, BusyBox Vi, and all Vi-related projects - a dedicated group of developers, maintainers, and users who continue to redefine what a text editor can be!

Vi and its descendants have stood the test of time, evolving into powerful, efficient, and customizable tools that developers, sysadmins, and writers rely on every day. Whether it's the legendary Vim, the modern and extensible Neovim, or the lightweight BusyBox Vi, these projects embody the spirit of freedom, flexibility, and innovation in software. The work we do as a community - enhancing these editors, maintaining plugins, refining documentation, and welcoming new users - is something to be proud of! On this special day, let's take a moment to reflect on the impact of Free Software and the people who build it. The FSFE's "I Love Free Software" campaign reminds us why open-source contributions matter, and posts like this one show the passion behind our work. And of course, we can never say thank you enough to Bram Moolenaar and everyone who has shaped Vim and its ecosystem over the years. To all contributors, maintainers, and users of Vim, Neovim, BusyBox Vi, and every Vi-inspired editor: your work matters, and today, we celebrate you! (Christian Brabandt)

[2024-11-08] Bram has been posthumously honored by the Free Software Foundation Europe and received the Europe SFS Award 2024. (Christian Brabandt)

[2024-04-18] Patch 9.1.327 brings support for the freedesktop XDG Base Directory Specification and has now been merged. A few more adjustments have been made withe following patches: v9.1.0337 and 9.1.345. That means, you can now place your configuration files under ~/.config/vim/ instead of ~/.vim so Vim will stop littering your home directory. Note: To make this change backwards compatible, Vim will only attempt to source from that location, if ~/.vim/vimrc and ~/.vimrc file do not exist. So it won't impact existing users, but users that want to start using the new location, will need to move their existing configuration to the new place. You can also read about it at :h xdg-base-dir. Thanks to all the contributors that help Vim continuing to grow! (Christian Brabandt)

[2024-01-02] The Vim project is happy to announce that Vim 9.1 has finally been released. This release is dedicated to Bram Moolenaar, Vims lead developer for more than 30 years, who suddenly passed away in August 2023. The most notable changes are support for Vim9 classes and objects, smooth scrolling support and virtual text support. And as usual, runtime files have been updated, many bugs have been fixed and potential security relevant fixes have been included. You can find the full announcement here. (Christian Brabandt)

[2023-10-12] The Vim homepage will be renovated by a few students from the FH University Salzburg. Development will happen at a new Github repository. Feedback is very welcome and can happen at the vim_dev mailing list or at the github repository.
See the announcement. (Christian Brabandt)

[2023-09-26] The Vim project has been moved to a new hosting provider.
The hosting should be much more stable now and database problems should now also been solved.
Thanks to Wavestack for hosting us. (Christian Brabandt)

[2023-09-24] The Vim project will move to a new homepage on tuesday, september 26th, 2023 around 08:00 pm CEST.
During that time there may be some issues connecting to the current homepage (or trying to login) but hopefully they will be resolved very soon.
The new vim.org domain name should then resolve to the new IP 31.172.117.18.
This homepage here will stay in read-only mode and no longer maintained.
Read the announcement at the vim_announce mailing list. (Christian Brabandt)

[2023-08-08] The Vim project is deeply shocked and saddened by the sudden passing of Bram. We certainly will miss him, his guidance and his humour.

The Vim project wouldn't exist without his ongoing passion to lead and develop Vim and the community for more than 30 years.

Our deepest condolences to all his family and may they have enough strengths to come through these saddened times. We lost a great guy way too early, who should have had the chance to enjoy and live for at least several more years!

In addition he was well-known for collecting donations for the ICCF foundation and helping many children in Uganda. And despite the saddened news, during the last 7 days an incredible amount of EURO 60,000 was donated. That is so awesome. Thank you all contributors!

An incredible amount of people have been giving respect and saying goodby at here and you'll find obituary articles and links here.

It is in Brams interest to continue the Vim project even if development now will slow down, but hopefully the community is being able to step up and continue the work in the next years. (Christian Brabandt)

[2022-09-09] Cleaning up after creating a file or directory can easily be forgotten. To make it easier the :defer command has been added. It works like it does in the Go language. Also, you can add a flag to writefile() and mkdir() to have them defer a delete() call. This is especially useful in tests, where temp files need to be cleaned up. Read about it in the help file. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2022-09-09] The past weeks a new feature has been added, that allows for displaying text in between the buffer text. Since this text does not exist in the file this is often called "virtual text". The virtual text can appear inside the line, after the line and below the line. You can read about it in the help. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2022-06-28] Finally, after years of hard work, there is a new major release of Vim. Besides many additions and fixes, the main new item is the support for Vim9 script. You can go straight to the Download page and try it out. Or read the announcement. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2022-02-22] I'm sad to announce that a member of the Vim community is no longer here. See this message: https://groups.google.com/g/vim_announce/c/MJBKVd-xrEE This is what vim.org looked like when Sven was still maintaining it: vim.org in 2001. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2022-01-21] Evrone interviewed me about my work on Vim. You can read it here (Bram Moolenaar)

[2021-11-19] How time flies, another year has passed with lots of activity. Issues are reported, bugs are fixed, pull requests are opened and closed. Vim 9 is still under development, slow progress at the moment, it should catch up soon. Thanks everybody for making Vim even better! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2020-11-11] Of course there is also Vim total landscaping. It will last for four seasons! Sorry, no fire extinguisher. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2020-11-03] 29 years ago the very first version of Vim was built and distributed. And Vim is more popular than ever before! So, what's going on these days? Read it in this message. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2020-09-10] Since the normal VimConf was cancelled because of the pandemic, others organised an online version. This happened in the weekend of September 5. You can now find most of the talks on YouTube. See the conference website. Note that each speaker had its own way of recording, the quality is mixed. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2020-07-09] Not much news has appeared here for a while, so let's dig up some old stuff! The talk about Vim's 25th birthday can be found here. It gives a nice overview of how Vim became what it is now. A much older talk, but about stuff that never gets old is 7 Habits For Effective Text Editing. Anybody who spends more than an hour a day editing text should watch it. I recently discovered a University lecture about Vim here. It's amazing how many Vim tutorials can be found on Youtube. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2019-12-12] More than a year after 8.1 and 2424 patches: Here is 8.2! You can read the announcement on this page. Main new feature is support for Popup windows. To show it off a silly game was created. Happy Vimming! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2019-12-02] VimConf 2019 was held successfully in Tokyo. Big thanks to the organizers! Videos can now be found on Youtube. Photos can be found on the VimConf website (Bram Moolenaar)

[2019-09-09] Last year's VimConf was a great success. You can find links to the slides and videos on the website. VimConf 2019 is taking place on November 3rd in Tokyo. It looks like tickets are still available here. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2018-12-01] VimConf was very well organised and there were many interesting talks. I have done a keynote, I hope it was appreciated. You can find the slides listed here. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2018-11-03] 27 years ago the first version of Vim was published: 1.14 The date "November 2" can be found in the binary, so that's the official birthday of Vim. You can see my 25 year presentation on Youtube (Bram Moolenaar)

[2018-10-19] The one and only Vim conference will be held on November 24 in Tokyo. You can see the program here. Unfortunately, it's already completely sold out! I'm happy to be invited to do the keynote. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2018-08-13] Matthias has (finally!) organised all the information about last year's Vimfest in Berlin. The result is a comprehensive overview of all the speakers, slides and videos. Read it all on the vimfest site. Unfortunately, there are no plans for a Vimfest 2018. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2018-06-28] If you can see this news entry, then the migration of http://www.vim.org to the new osdn datacenter has been performed. successfully. It might take some time until vim.org resolves to the new host, you can use http://www.vim8.org if you experience issues. (Christian Brabandt)

[2018-05-17] Vim 8.1 is a minor release, a few new features have been added since Vim 8.0. A lot of bugs have been fixed, documentation was updated, etc. The main new feature is the terminal window. More information can be found on this page. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2018-04-28] There will be some maintenance work on April 30th for moving to a different hosting provider. See the announcement. This means, that scripts cannot be uploaded and there might appear some error messages. (Christian Brabandt)

[2018-04-04] The SFI conference is taking place in Krakow from April 5 to 7. There are talks on various topics of computer software. My talk "Vim: recent developments" is on Friday at 12:30. You can find the agenda here. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2018-03-04] SourceForge has moved to new infrastructure. Unfortunately this caused an outage for a few days. Currently it appears everything is working again. On the positive side, SSL is now fully supported, all the pages are on https://www.vim.org. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2017-09-08] Vimfest is happening again! 22 to 24 September in Berlin. Find more information on the website. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2017-09-02] Since the Vim website hosts scripts, security is relevant. SourceForge now supports using https, but only on sourceforge.io. That is why you now get redirected from vim.org to vim.sourceforge.io. Let me know if something does not work. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2017-03-18] It's no surprise to Vim users, but always nice to see how Vim compares to other editors. You can view the list on diffur.com. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2017-02-13] Notice the "go to HTTPS page" link in the header? Use it to go to the securely connected version of the same Vim pages. This runs on the sourceforge servers, thus the URL cannot end in vim.org. This is especially recommended if you upload or download scripts. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2016-12-14] On November 2nd I did a presentation about Vim at Google Zurich. This is exactly 25 years since the first public version of Vim was built. The presentation gives an overview of Vim history and highlights the important choices that were made. With background information on my personal life and what was the state of computing, the context in which Vim was developed. You can find it on Youtube. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2016-12-02] Releasing version 8.0 and getting close to the 25th birthday inspired the writing of this article. It contains links to relevant info and can be used to convince a friend to start using Vim. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2016-11-02] Vim version 1.14 was the first public release of Vim, distributed on Fred Fish disk 591. The executable has the version information "Vi IMitation v1.14 (Nov 2 1991 0:36:35)". That is exactly 25 years ago. Raise your glass to Vim! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2016-09-12] After more than ten years there is a major Vim release. It gives you interesting new features, such as channels, JSON, Jobs, Timers, Partials, Lambdas, Closures, Packages and more. Test coverage has been increased, many bugs were fixed, this is a rock stable version. Read more about it in the announcement. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2016-09-07] A test version is available, hopefully the last one before 8.0. This includes several fixes and an updated Ruby version in the MS-Windows build. Please give it a try, last chance to report problems! The relevant information can be found in the announcement (Bram Moolenaar)

[2016-08-28] The Vim Berlin user group is organizing a gathering for Vim enthusiasts. I'll be doing a talk on Saturday. See the website: Vimfest (Bram Moolenaar)

[2016-08-16] Work on Vim 8.0 is coming close to an end. I hope version 8.0 can be released in about two weeks. This is a last chance to modify new features in a way that is not backwards compatible. Once 8.0 is out we can't make changes that would break plugins. An overview of new features can be found on GitHub. A version with hyperlinks (but a day older) is on appspot. If you have remarks please discuss them on the vim-dev maillist. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2016-07-03] The past months many new features have been included, such as asynchronous communication, job control, timers and much more. The number of reported problems is steadily going down. This is an indication the quality is getting to an adequate level. There are still a few pieces to get in place and patches to include. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2016-06-03] Quite a few people vote for questions like "What are the best resources for learning vim?" and "What are the best VIM color-schemes?". This can be found on Slant: http://www.slant.co/search?query=vim. Judging by the answer to "What are the best programming text editors?" this site can't be bad :-). (Bram Moolenaar)

[2016-05-07] Vim users are asked to help poor children in Kibaale, located in the south of Uganda. I have visited the project to see how they are doing. You can read my report here. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2015-12-29] The "Practical Vim" book by Drew Neil is now available in a second edition. The number of tips has increased from 100 to 123 and the text was updated for Vim 7.4. Another book from the Pragmatic Programmers is "The VimL Primer". You can find more information and links to Amazon on this page. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2015-12-17] This is the one and only Vim desktop calendar. Find the PDF files here (Bram Moolenaar)

[2015-10-07] Vimfest 10 - 11 October 2015 Read about it in this post. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2015-09-25] No actual news, but you might find this story interesting and/or entertaining: Vim Creep, written by Rudis Muiznieks. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2015-08-21] The move from Google Code to GitHub is done! You can now clone the GitHub repository, see this page. If you prefer to keep using Mercurial, or want to know how to move over, see this page. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2015-08-18] Google Code is shutting down, therefore the repository has to move somewhere else. Moving to GitHub turned out to be the most popular, so that is what we are doing now. While the move is in progress no changes are to be made, not to the old location and not to the new location (yet). Specifically, please don't create new issues or change existing issues. Unfortunately it's not possible to disable this without shutting down everything. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2015-08-02] Unfortunately the Vim website was down for almost a week. Sorry! The cause was that SourceForge had a serious case of data corruption. Read about it here. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2014-10-31] A feature I enjoy using myself is not known to many users, as I found out last weekend. Besides undo with as many levels as you like, Vim also offers storing the undo information in a file. So you can exit Vim, reboot your computer and still undo changes you made. See the help for 'undofile'. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2014-01-10] Pritesh Ugrankar has written an article that was published in the Open Source For You Magazine. You can read it here (PDF). Thanks to the publisher to allow us to re-publish the article. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2013-08-10] Finally, after more than a thousand patches, there is a new version of Vim. This is mostly a bug-fix release. Also, many runtime files have been improved, syntax highlighting and indenting works better. To find out the details, do ":help version7.4" after installing it. Direct link to the MS-Windows installer. For Linux you probably want to use Mercurial for convenient building. For MacVim look here. Otherwise see the download page. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2013-07-06] Vim 7.4a BETA has been made available. Since 7.3 more than a thousand improvements have been made. Many people already tried out recent versions and sent bug reports and fixes. Thus it should already be stable enough for daily use. But let's do some testing before calling it 7.4. You can read the announcement here. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2013-05-17] 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. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2011-11-26] Ryan Paul wrote a nice article after figuring out that Vim was born 20 years ago. That is the day Vim was first send out to the world. I have actually been working on it a big longer, let's consider that a pregnancy (without the side effects :-). You can find the full article here. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2011-04-28] Vim users are encouraged to support needy children in Uganda, as a "thank you" for all the work. I have recently visited the project to see what they are doing with our donations. They are doing very well! Read my visit report, with lots of pictures, you can find it here. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2010-08-15] Finally, after two years of hard work, this is a new release of Vim. It includes an awful lot of bug fixes and a few new features. It is better than ever before. For the details see the announcement or go directly to the download page. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2010-08-13] This is the last BETA before the 7.3 release. Please give it a try and report any problem you notice. If you don't then 7.3 won't be as good as it could have been! See the announcement for more information. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2010-08-08] This might be the last BETA version before the 7.3 release. Reported problems have been fixed, it should be ready for daily use now. Read the details in the announcement. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2010-08-05] Main reason to make this version available is the switch in MS-Windows compiler. Previously I used MSVC 2010, which generates binaries that don't run on MS-Windows 2000. Now MSVC 2008 was used, we need to check whether these binaries also run on new versions of MS-Windows. More details in the announcement. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2010-08-01] Getting closer to Vim 7.3!. Mostly bug fixes since 7.3b. More testing is still needed, please try it out and report any problems you find. You can find the announcement with download instructions here: announcement. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2010-07-25] Another step in getting to Vim 7.3. Bugs have been fixed and the new features have been tuned. More testing is needed, please try it out and report any problems you find. You can find the announcement with download instructions here: announcement. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2010-07-18] A lot of patches have been included, bugs fixed, documentation updated, runtime files added... Time for a release! Well, it needs to be tested first. So, try it out and report any problems you find. You can find the announcement with download instructions here: announcement (Bram Moolenaar)

[2010-05-15] After more than 400 patches for Vim 7.2 it's about time for a new release! Vim 7.3 is going to be mostly a bugfix release. But I also plan to include a few new features. This has been discussed on the Vim-dev maillist. For now the test version will only be available as source code from Mercurial. This allows for quickly making updates. See the Mercurial page for instructions. Please try it out and report any problems. Discussions about Vim 7.3 will take place in the vim-dev maillist (Bram Moolenaar)

[2010-02-21] The collection of Vim scripts keeps growing. It gets more difficult to find the one you need. Some are outdated, some are wonderful. To allow users to comment on scripts I have added a link. You can find it in the upper right of each script page. This link takes you to the wikia Vim site. Most pages are empty, feel free to create one and add something useful for other Vim users. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2009-12-08] You can now show off your preferred editor to all people around you. It's a simple "distinguished" design. A small amount of the price goes to help Vim, which in fact means goes to help needy children in Uganda. You can order the T-shirt at Freewear (Bram Moolenaar)

[2009-05-12] Vim comes for free. I do ask you to consider helping Vim's charity, please read on. In April I have visited the Kibaale Childrens Centre. You can read my report, with lots of pictures, here. The new clinic has become very popular. Every day many patients come here for medical help that would otherwise not be available to them. The Kibaale clinic saves lives! This popularity comes at a price. We struggle to pay for all the medicine, salaries of the medical staff, maintenance of equipment, etc. Therefore I have set up this page for sponsoring a room in the clinic. We need your help! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2008-12-21] The usual Vim desktop calendar is now available for download and printing: http://www.moolenaar.net/#Calendar. If you print it on thick paper you can fold it so that it stands on your desk. One side contains a useful 12-month calendar. On the other side there is brief information about ICCF-Holland, Vim and A-A-P. Happy Vimming in 2009! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2008-08-09] After fifteen months of work: a brand new Vim release! This is a stable version. There are many bug fixes and updated runtime files. The only new feature worth mentioning is support for floating point. Upgrading from a previous version is highly recommended: a few crashing bugs and several security issues were fixed. For the details see the announcement. Or go directly to the download page. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2008-08-07] There were too many changes since 7.2b was released to jump to the 7.2 release. So this is another beta test round. Hopefully all the important issues were fixed now. Most of them were in the runtime files. Give it a try and report any problems you find. More information in the announcement. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2008-07-13] We are getting closer to the 7.2 release, but another BETA test round is needed. This version has a few bug fixes and updated runtime files since 7.2a. Main new feature compared to Vim 7.1: support for floating point numbers. More information can be found in the announcement. This is a beta test version. It's quite stable, but we want to make sure it's perfect. Let me know when you find a problem! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2008-06-26] Yes, we are working towards the 7.2 release. Mostly bug fixes and updated runtime files. Main new feature: support for floating point numbers. More information can be found in the announcement. This is a beta test version. It's quite stable, but we want to make sure it's perfect. Let me know when you find a problem! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2008-06-18] The Kibaale Childrens Centre is building a new clinic. The construction is almost ready, now it has to be filled with furniture and medical equipment. We need your help for that! You can read about this on the new Kibaale clinic page. This is Vim's charity project. If you enjoy using Vim, please consider helping the clinic. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2007-08-01] Kim Schulz has written a book about using Vim. The full title is: "Hacking Vim: A Cookbook to get the Most out of the Latest Vim Editor". I have written a bit of info about it on the Vim books page. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2007-07-18] I have decided to move the maillists to Google Groups. It appears to work well enough to do this, and should be a good long-term solution. IMPORTANT: subscribers of the old lists are not automatically added! You need to subscribe to the new groups to get messages! More info about the maillists on the Vim maillist page. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2007-07-13] As you noticed the @vim.org mail and maillists are still not working. We were working on a replacement, but the person implementing it became unreachable. Several people suggested using Google groups. To try this out I have setup the list vim-experiment@googlegroups.com. You can reach it at vim-experiment@vim.org. Please use this list for discussions about moving the maillists to Google groups. If there are not too many negative remarks I will move all the Vim lists there. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2007-06-11] Unfortunately our mail server is not functional at the moment. All maillists are down and other @vim.org mail also doesn't go through. It's unclear how long it will take for this to be fixed. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2007-05-12] After one year and five days of waiting: a brand new Vim release! This is a stable version. There are many bug fixes and updated runtime files. No amazing new features. Upgrading from a previous version is highly recommended: a few crashing bugs and a security issue were fixed. For the details see the announcement. Or jump directly to the download page. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2007-05-10] Since making 7.1a I received several updated runtime files and a few problems were fixed. Too many changes to jump to the 7.1 release. Thus here is another BETA version. There will be a couple of days to verify everything is perfect in order. Well, one mistake in the source files is already found and fixed (patch 7.1b.001). Read more about the release in the announcement. I (Bram Moolenaar)

[2007-05-05] It has been nearly a year since Vim 7.0 has been released. There have been many patches for the source code and updates to the runtime files. Vim 7.1 will include all this and not much more. A convenient way to get all the improvements. But first a BETA version: 7.1a. I expect it to be stable, but let's test it for a few days to make sure. Read more about it in the announcement. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2007-03-17] Instead of doing a boring holiday job, students can work on Vim this summer. Ideas for what could be worked on can be found on the ideas page. But you can also come up with your own task. Keep in mind that the number of students that will be accepted is limited, thus write a good application. For more information about the Google Summer of Code program, you can visit the program page. Students should plan to submit their applications by March 24, 2007. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2007-02-20] February 13th I did a presentation on Vim, called "Seven habits of effective text editing 2.0". I was happy to see a lot of people come to listen to me. Many more than expected, we ran out of food and had to get extra chairs. Thanks to all who were there, it was nice to have a big audience. And I was excited to greet some of the people who I previously only knew through e-mail. The links of the video and the presentation can be found in this message. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2007-02-05] Tuesday, February 13th, I will be giving a presentation at the Google offices in Mountain View. The title is "Seven habits for effective text editing, 2.0". It will start at 7 pm. More information can be found on the Google code site. For instructions how to get there click on "Mountain View headquarters". But pay attention to the building number 41, there are many Google buildings :-). Hope to see many of you there! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2007-02-04] The problem in the @vim.org email has been solved, we're back! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2007-02-03] Due to a configuration issue mail to the @vim.org maillists and other addresses, such as bugs @ vim.org is not working. Please hold on to your messages until this is fixed. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2007-01-11] The previously reported problems with scripts has been solved. But then we were hit by link spam in the Tip notes. I have added the possibility to remove individual notes. Moderators volunteered to go through the tips and delete the spam. Thanks to them it has been cleaned up. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2006-12-09] The mysql table that holds scripts has "crashed" and needs to be repaired. I'm working with sf support to fix it. During this time, scripts will not be available. Thanks for your patience. (Scott Johnston)

[2006-10-01] An audio recording of the Vim BOF at euroOSCON in Brussels is now available. There are two files: 17 Mbyte (.wav) and 8 Mbyte (.mp3) in size. The quality is good enough to understand what is being said. For an overview of the subjects discussed see this message. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2006-09-01] I am hosting a Vim BOF at the upcoming O'Reilly Open Source Convention. The subject will be the future of Vim. Will there be a Vim 8? This will be a highly interactive and fun BOF. It will take place on Tuesday, 19 September 2006, 20:30 - 21:30. The conference is held in Brussels, 18 - 21 September. More information on the BOF page (Bram Moolenaar)

[2006-05-08] After years of development this feature packed editor is waiting for you. For the impatient, go directly to the download page. For the curious, read the announcement. Happy Vimming! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2006-04-24] The Vim 7.0f BETA version is now available. With a bit of luck this will be the last test release before Vim 7 goes out. But quite a few things changed since the last BETA, thus more testing is needed to discover any remaining problems. For details read the announcement. Or go directly to the development page with download information. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2006-04-23] The CVS repository at SourceForge still isn't working properly. Fortunately, Edward L. Fox has now setup a Subversion one. It appears to work well and contains the latest Vim 7 files, updated daily. More information on the development page. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2006-04-10] The beta testing has resulted in a number of bug fixes and adjustments to new features. The 7.0d BETA version is now available. See the announcement. Although Vim 7 appears to work well and seems ready for daily use, a couple more weeks of testing should reveal any remaining problems. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2006-03-29] The Vim maillists are working again. But apparently the messages from Monday morning until Wednesday afternoon are lost. Bad luck with two servers that lost power. If your message didn't get through, try sending it again. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2006-03-28] You may have noticed that the Vim maillists are not working. Actually, all @vim.org mail doesn't work since Monday morning. The problem is that the mail server went down in a power surge. And now it refuses to boot up :-(. Hopefully this can be fixed soon. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2006-03-27] Vim 7 has now entered the beta testing stage. Since many people have been using the alpha snapshots it is already quite stable. But it needs to be tested by a large audience to be sure. And we may still change a few things before everything is frozen when Vim 7 is released. Read the announcement for 7.0b in the maillist archive. (the 7.0c message didn't get through yet, it should be here soon) Or go to the development page. :wq (Bram Moolenaar)

[2006-01-25] The feed for Vim tips existed for some time already. Now there also is a feed for scripts. On the scripts index page you should see the RSS logo. This uses Atom instead of RSS 2.0, hopefully it works just as well. The URL for the feed is http://plasmasturm.org/feeds/vimscripts/. It was setup by Aristotle Pagaltzis. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2005-12-10] Sven Guckes has started a Frappr! map for Vim. This means you can see where Vimmers live and who else in your neighbourhood uses Vim. It's easy to add yourself too. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2005-11-18] I suppose I should be surprised that it took this long but it appears as if the spammers have found us. There are two things that I want to do to fix this: (1) Implement moderators, (2) Require login to post a tip. I would like to get a quick and dirty version of #1 up quickly to deal with the problem. I am looking for volunteers to moderate. A moderator must: (a) visit and read tips regularly, (b) be willing to dedicate time to moderating, (c) be a good person. OK, so I admit (c) might be a bit much but if you are a vim user there is a good chance you are a good person (it is the emacs users I never know if I can trust :). If you are interested please send me an email at scott dot m dot johnston at g mail dot com. Thanks for your patience. (Scott Johnston)

[2005-10-15] It has been more than a year since version 6.3 was released. Dozens of bugs have been fixed, runtime files were added and updated. There are no new features, these go into Vim 7 now (still under development). This is a stable Vim release, everybody is encouraged to upgrade to version 6.4. Release notes can be found in the announcement. Or do ":help version-6.4" after installing. Happy Vimming! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2005-10-09] At last a new release! This is Vim 6.3 plus lots of patches plus updated runtime files. Most of this has been tested for a while, thus you can use this release for daily work. Because of the long time since the previous release this BETA version was made to check for any problems in the distributed files. If you see something wrong, please report it! More information in the release message. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2005-07-06] Spell checking has been added. This happens while redrawing, like with syntax highlighting. The code and data structures have been optimized to make spell checking very fast. Vim can give you suggestions to correct spelling errors. This is partly based on Aspell and works well: in two out of three cases the first suggestion is the word you will want to use. The word lists from OpenOffice.org an be used, thus there is immediate support for many languages. Vim uses its own spell file format, which is much more compact and loads faster. You can either build your own spell file or get them from the ftp site. All this is still an alpha version! It appears to work fine, but keep in mind that command syntax, option names, etc. may still change. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2005-04-20] Jason Diamond has added an RSS 2.0 feed for the recent Vim Tips. You can see an RSS icon on the Tips index page. The URL for the feed is http://www.vim.org/tips/rss2.php. More information can be found in the announcement in the Vim mailing list. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2005-01-28] If you don't read the vim-dev maillist you may have missed that work on Vim 7 is well under way. Many patches have been included and I am now working on adding "big" features. Three new data types have been added: Function references, Lists and Dictionaries. There is still much more to come, don't expect a release soon. If you want to see what is going on, try out a snapshot. See the download/development page. The voting results help me decide what to work on. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2004-11-17] The Linux Journal magazine does a Readers' Choice Award every year. For the fourth time in a row Vim was selected the favorite text editor! Vi and clones came second, GNU Emacs third. You can read this and the results in other categories in the press release. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2004-10-06] The BOF session at SANE 2004 was a big success. About 40 to 50 Vim users attended. Subjects discussed were intelligent completion (intellisense), undo tree and a few others. An audio recording was made by Aschwin Marsman . It is about 43 minutes playtime. You can download it from the Vim ftp server in patent-free Ogg Vorbis format (22 Mbyte): ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/extra/sane2004_vim_bof.ogg Or in mp3 format (about 31 Mbyte): ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/extra/sane2004_vim_bof.mp3 (Bram Moolenaar)

[2004-07-11] For the first time I will be giving a half-day tutorial on Vim. It is intented for Vim users that know the basic commands and want to learn more. There is much more at the SANE conference, such as an MySQL tutorial by the writer of the MySQL documentation, a FreeBSD 5.2 tutorial by Kirk McKusick, a keynote by Paul Kilmartin from eBay, a presentation by Unix veteran Peter Salus and a presentation about the special effects in the movie "I robot" by the oscar winning John Nelson. For people with a tight budget: the Free Software Bazaar on Wednesday is for free. Richard Stallman wil start it off with a presentation. SANE takes place September 27 to October 1 in Amsterdam. More info on the SANE website. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2004-06-08] It has been a year since version 6.2. During that year many bugs were fixed and a few new features added. The support for multiple languages has been improved. It is now possible to use translated help files. A lot of testing has been done and all reported problems have been solved. This is the most stable Vim release ever! Release notes can be found in the announcement. Or do ":help version-6.3" after installing. Happy Vimming! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2004-05-17] The main problems with version 6.3a were on Windows 98. The NSIS installer didn't work on some systems and when 'encoding' is "utf-8" editing a file was impossible. That appears to be fixed now, but enough was changed to justify another beta-test round. Please test this version and report all problems, it might be quite a while until the next version. Release notes can be found here. Vim 6.3b can be downloaded from the ftp site. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2004-05-06] Almost a year has passed since version 6.2 was released. Many, many bugs have been fixed, script files updated and added, translations made, etc. Finally they have ended up in this beta release. There are just a few new features. And the Amiga binaries are included again! The release notes can be found here. Or go directly to the ftp site. Give 6.3a a good test, we want 6.3 final to be rock stable. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2004-03-12] After a period of neglection, the VimDoc pages have been cleaned up. The looks now resemble this site. The contents has been checked and updated where necessary. It is now once more the place to search for answers to your Vim questions. Thanks to Dan Sharp! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2004-01-09] The Vim web site has been extended with a voting system. Those who donate to help Vim development will be able to vote for features they would like to have implemented. The past years the todo list has been getting longer and longer. Through donations I will be able to spend more time on Vim, so that bugs get fixed and new features will be added. More about this on the sponsor page. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2003-12-30] You can find the Vim desktop calendar at moolenaar.net. On one side there is an easy-to-read 2004 calendar. On the other side there is brief info on Vim, ICCF Holland and A-A-P. You can print this on one sheet of paper, fold it and add a bit of glue to make it stand on your desk. Happy Vimming in 2004! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2003-10-10] Every year the popular Linux Journal magazine asks their readers what their favorite application is. The voting is split up in several categories, such as "favorite Distribution" and "Favorite Programming Beverage". For "Favorite Text Editor" Vim was selected. Third time in a row! You can read the announcement here. The November issue of Linux Journal will contain more information. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2003-10-09] We all know that Vim is a good text editor. But for desktop applications you would expect browsers and word processors to be most often used. Surprisingly Vim pops up in a list of favorite desktop apps on NewsForge. Not surprising is that more people use Vi/Vim than Emacs/XEmacs. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2003-08-29] The frontpage of the Vim website was replaced with a protest page against software patents for the past few days. The reason is that software patents are a threat to open-source software. They could cripple the development and distribution of Vim. The European Union was going to vote on a law to legalize software patents on September 1st, but due to the overwelming protests this has been postponed. This doesn't mean we are out of trouble yet! More information about software patents on this page. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2003-06-01] A complete new release of Vim is waiting to be downloaded! This is mostly a bugfix release, only a few new features are available: Arabic support, exception handling, GTK 2 support, PostScript printing for 8-bit encodings and a number of smaller things. Several hundreds of bugs have been fixed. For the full list of changes do ":help version-6.2" in the new Vim. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2003-05-23] Finally you can join your favorite drink with your favorite editor: It's the Vim mug! Besides the Vim logo there are a dozens of Vim commands explained. We tried adding all the commands, but realized it's difficult to drink coffee from a bath tub. You can order the Vim mug with rootshop.de. Note: the site is in German and orders can be made from Europe only. As a nice touch half a euro of each mug goes to ICCF Holland. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2003-05-18] All new features for Vim 6.2 have been included. The coming weeks testing will take place to make sure 6.2 is ready for the world. Remarks about Vim 6.2e can be found in the announcement. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2003-04-21] This is work in progress! Basically it is Vim 6.1 with all 474 patches included, plus many new and updated runtime files, plus two big patches: GTK 2 support and the ":try"/":catch"/":finally" mechanism. The announcement can be found here. Fixing will continue for a number of weeks before the 6.2 release will be ready. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2003-02-22] Wolfram Esser has made an animation with the Vim logo. This is quite a bit of fun to see and hear. The animation is available in various formats and two resolutions here. Don't be suprised if downloading is a bit slow, the files are 1.5 to 9 Mbyte. Have fun! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2003-02-11] The financial report for the ICCF Holland foundation over 2002 is available. ICCF handles most of the donations of Vim users for Vim's charity: a project in Uganda that helps AIDS victims. Not only was more money sent to the project than before, the costs have remained below one percent. Thus 99% of the money was used to help the children. You can find the report here: iccf-holland.org/2002.html. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2002-12-29] This is a table-top calendar, made from one sheet of paper. On one side it contains the calendar for 2003 with week numbers. On the reverse there is brief info about Vim, ICCF-Holland and A-A-P. It is available in Dutch and English, PostScript and PDF. You can download it here (Bram Moolenaar)

[2002-11-20] George Reilly, empoyee at Microsoft, challenged Vim users at Microsoft to raise money for their favorite text editor. They managed to raise $1,375. Microsoft will match that with $1,275, yielding a total of $2,650. You can read the full message here. I am grateful for the Microsoft employees and Microsoft itself to help Vim's charityware concept! More info about Vim's charityware here. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2002-10-17] The results for the yearly Readers' Choice Awards of the Linux Journal are in. You can guess which program won the "Favorite Text Editor" category. You can see the 25 categories and winners here. Or read the November 2002 issue of the Linux Journal. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2002-09-19] Many syntax, indent and other scripts in the runtime directory are updated regularly. A new page has been added to www.vim.org that lists the URLs in the runtime files. You can use this to check if an updated version is available. The list is generated automatically from the "URL:" headers. You can find it here. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2002-08-04] Enough testing, let's move the new web site on-line! I hope you like the new design. If you think something should look different, let's discuss this in the Vim maillist. If there is something wrong with the navigation or when you get error messages, report this to Bram (Bram AT vim.org). If you are missing some Vim information or have suggestions how to improve the text, contact Ricardo Signes (samael-vim AT lists.manxome.org). (Bram Moolenaar)

[2002-07-25] Since Sven's Vim pages have stopped working, we speeded up the redesign of the Vim pages. Ricardo Signes has done most of the work by making a layout to fit all the information into and filling the pages with the initial content. You can view the pages here: http://vim.sf.net/new/. If you see something that doesn't work or looks messed up, please report it to Bram (Bram AT vim.org). If some blob of Vim information is missing, please report it to Ricardo (samael-vim AT lists.manxome.org). For discussions about the looks the Vim maillist can be used. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2002-07-01] You might have noticed that Sven's pages on www.vim.org are broken. Quite a few pages are completely empty, including the download and news pages. Unfortunately, we have been unable to contact Sven. For the time being, www.vim.org is being redirected to vim.sf.net. You can still go to Sven's pages with this link. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2002-06-27] Maintenance of Vim continues. There are now over a hundred patches for Vim 6.1. More to come soon. The patches can be found here. There are no updates for binary versions, you have to compile yourself (it's not difficult). (Bram Moolenaar)

[2002-03-24] After almost half a year of fixing bugs, improving translations and adding syntax and indent files, here is a new Vim release. There are no new features worth mentioning. Many people have tested this version in the past weeks, it is the most stable Vim ever. See the download page for how to get it. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2002-03-10] Since the release of Vim 6.0 many bugs have been fixed. This BETA version includes them all, plus the fixes since version 6.1a. There are also updated syntax files and other scripts. Give it a good test to make sure the 6.1 release will be ultra stable. You can download Vim 6.1b from ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unstable. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2002-03-02] Since the release of Vim 6.0 many bugs have been fixed. This BETA version includes them all. There are also updated syntax files and other scripts. Give it a good test to make sure the 6.1 release will be ultra stable. You can download Vim 6.1a from ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unstable. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2001-12-29] You can find a Vim desktop calendar here. On one side there is brief info on Vim and ICCF Holland. You can print this on one sheet of paper and fold it to make it stand on your desk. It is available in Dutch and English, PostScript and PDF, A4 and Letter paper. Happy Vimming in 2002! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2001-12-21] As you all know, Vim users are asked to help poor children in Uganda. Donations for the children can now be done through the German organization MISEROER. MISEROER then sends the money to the project in Uganda. Using this method allows for getting a tax reduction in Germany. This can also be used for sponsoring a child. More information can be found by using one of these links: http://www.vim.org/iccf/germany.html    http://iccf-holland.org/germany.html    http://www.iccf.nl/germany.html (Bram Moolenaar)

[2001-11-06] Bram recently visited the Kibaale Childrens Centre in Uganda. This is where the Vim charityware money goes. You can read about his visit as well as help the children yourself. Thanks for your support. (Scott Johnston)

[2001-10-18] As Denis Perelyubskiy noted on the mailing list, Linux Journal has released its 2001 Readers' Choice Awards. Vim has won the "Favorite Editor" category! (Scott Johnston)

[2001-10-12] Vim online crossed the 100 script boundary last week. Current stats are: scripts=116, total script downloads=11,721, tips=128, registered users=306. The usage stats have been a constant 4,000-6,000 page views a day. After the 6.0 release we peaked at 24,000 page views in a day. You can see the page stats here. Upward and onward... (Scott Johnston)

[2001-09-27] Finally, after years of development, here is the new major version of Vim. More features than you can imagine. More reliable. Faster. More colors. More documentation. And more. For details see the announcement. Happy Vimming! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2001-09-21] Vim 6.0ax appears to be working well. The past two weeks many bugs have been fixed. You can see more information in the announcement. If all goes well, the 6.0 release is expected in just a few days. If you still notice a problem, report it now! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2001-09-04] Vim 6.0au appears to be doing very well. The client-server functionality now also works properly on MS-Windows. Postscript printing has been further improved. See the announcement for more info and links. From now on it's bug-fixing only! If all goes well, a release is expected halfway September. If you still notice a problem, report it now! (Bram Moolenaar)

[2001-08-15] Vim 6.0ar is now available. This third incantation in the 6.0 beta testing series includes a few bug fixes. New is printing in PostScript for systems other than MS-Windows. No real big problems have been found so far. Testing will continue for several more weeks to make sure Vim 6.0 will be rock stable. A few features are still being worked on (remote editing, printing, fontsets). See the announcement for more info and links. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2001-07-30] After a long period of development Vim 6.0 is now ready for beta testing. It includes a huge number of new features, for example folding and vertically split windows. You can find Vim 6.0ap in the unreleased directory of the ftp site. An announcement and list of files can be found here. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2001-07-30] With the release of version 6.0ap vim 6 development has reached beta status. The major changes in this version are support for running Vim inside another window when using the GTK frontend and improvements in the remote server commands for Unix. (Wichert Akkerman)

[2001-06-21] I have started a list of mistakes in the Vim book. This varies from simple typos to annoying errors in examples. You can find the page here: http://www.moolenaar.net/vim_errata.html If you find a mistake in the book that isn't in the list yet, or perhaps an item in the errata list that's wrong, send me a message. Preferably use the same format as used on the page. (Bram Moolenaar)

[2001-06-17] Vim version 6.0ak ALPHA is available. Major changes in this release are: added X-Windows communicationbetween two Vims. This makes it possible to send commands from oneVim to another. Use "--remote" to have files be edited in an already running Vim. Use "--serversend" or ":serversend" to send commands from one Vim to another (Wichert Akkerman)

[2001-06-11] A new alpha release for the vim 6 development has been released. The installation program for MS-Windows has been changed, but still not tested. Be careful with it. The major changes are 5 new chapters for the users manual, and a new :compiler command which provides an easy way to switch errorformat and makeprg. (Wichert Akkerman)

[2001-06-06] There are .deb packages available for Debian GNU/Linux unstable (only for i386 at the moment). To use them put this line in your /etc/apt/source.list: deb http://people.debian.org/~wakkerma/vim/ ./ (Wichert Akkerman)

[2001-05-26] Jonathan and I have combined the VUR and vim-tips into a single site called vim online. It allows you to upload scripts and add tips to a central location. It has been tested on windows IE 5.5, NS 4.7, NS 6.0 and NS linux. Bug reports should go to vimonline-support@lists.sourceforge.net. Please include your browser information and screenshots if applicable. Enjoy. (Scott Johnston)

[2001-05-22] The June 2001 issue of the Linux Journal has an article on Africa about the relation between software in third world countries. It's very well written and gives you a good idea of what people in Africa really need. The last section is about Vim in Uganda. (Scott Johnston)