

Discussion of Vim and Its Implementation - coliveira
http://www.free-soft.org/FSM/english/issue01/vim.html

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GrooveStomp
This is a really excellent writeup. It's light on technical details, exploring
much more the motivations behind why things have evolved the way they have.
But, Bram does show the project file layout with brief descriptions of what
each file contains, pertaining to Vim. Very good. Informative, interesting and
maybe even a little motivational.

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ryanf
It's interesting that in 2002 he wasn't using any revision control at all. Was
that common for open source projects at the time?

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olauzon
Linux kernel development was managed with tarballs and patches for the first
10 years, until BitKeeper was selected in 2002, then of course Git in 2005.

Source: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Revision_control> Also see
Linus Torvalds' Google Tech Talk on Git starting around 2:45
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8>

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riffraff
"powered by GNU Emacs" is a funny endpage note

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gnosis
_"In November 1998 an survey was held to allow Vim users to vote for changes
to Vim. This resulted in a good overview of what users wanted to be added.
This is the top six:"_

    
    
      1. Add folding (display only a selected part of the text)
      2. Vertically split windows (side-by-side)
      3. Add configurable auto-indenting for many languages (like 'cindent')
      4. Fix all problems, big and small; make Vim more robust
      5. Add Perl compatible search pattern
      6. Search patterns that cross line boundaries
    

Compare that to the top 6 most requested features today:

    
    
      1. add IDE features (debugger integration, shell window)
      2. add integration with Python instead of inventing more Vim script
      3. improve diff mode: automatic refresh, better merge support
      4. fix all problems, big and small; make Vim more robust
      5. improve syntax highlighting speed
      6. add an indication what text was changed since editing started (change bar or diff)
    
    

From:

<http://www.vim.org/sponsor/vote_results.php>

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uniclaude
Shame on me, I use Vim everyday and I didn't even know it was Charityware.

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mapleoin
It's even on the splash screen. Every time you open vim you can see _Help poor
children in Uganda!_ or something similar.

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riffraff
I guess grandparent usually does "vim <something>" or uses scripts that clear
the buffer (such as opening NERDTree on the current dir) which effectively
make the splash screen never appear.

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MBlume
Right, I doubt most of us see the splash screen that often -- I almost always
have a filename in mind when I first open vim.

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cstross
Point of note: this discussion is about a decade old (coming right after vim 6
came out -- we're now on vim 7.x).

~~~
city41
Last modified: Jan 15, 2002 according to the footer on the page.

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sigzero
I wish you could add your own custom icons...without recompiling. Other than
that, love Vim!

