*version7.txt* For Vim version 7.0aa. Last change: 2004 Oct 07 VIM REFERENCE MANUAL by Bram Moolenaar Welcome to Vim 7! A large number of features has been added. This file mentions all the new items, changes to existing features and bug fixes compared to Vim 6.x. See |vi_diff.txt| for an overview of differences between Vi and Vim 7.0. See |version4.txt| for differences between Vim 3.x and Vim 4.x. See |version5.txt| for differences between Vim 4.x and Vim 5.x. See |version6.txt| for differences between Vim 5.x and Vim 6.x. INCOMPATIBLE CHANGES |incompatible-7| NEW FEATURES |new-7| New data types |new-data-types| KDE support |new-KDE| Various new items |new-items-7| IMPROVEMENTS |improvements-7| COMPILE TIME CHANGES |compile-changes-7| BUG FIXES |bug-fixes-7| ============================================================================== INCOMPATIBLE CHANGES *incompatible-7* These changes are incompatible with previous releases. Check this list if you run into a problem when upgrading from Vim 6.x to 7.0 ":helpgrep" now uses a help window to display a match. Minor incompatibilities: For filetype detection: For many types, instead of ~/.dir/filename use */.dir/filename, so that it also works for other user's files. ":0verbose" now sets 'verbose' to zero instead of one. Removed the old and incomplete "VimBuddy" code. Buffers without a name report "No Name" instead of "No File". It was confusing for buffers with a name and 'buftype' set to "nofile". ============================================================================== NEW FEATURES *new-7* New data types *new-data-types* -------------- In Vim scripts the following types have been added: list ordered list of items dictionary associative array of items function reference to a function Many functions and commands have been added to support the new types. NOT IMPLEMENTED YET! KDE support *new-KDE* ----------- Kvim is the KDE version of Vim. It uses the Qt toolkit. See |KVim|. (Thomas Capricelli, Philippe Fremy, Mickael Marchand, Mark Westcott, et al.) MzScheme interface *new-MzScheme* ------------------ The MzScheme interpreter is supported. |MzScheme| The |:mzscheme| command can be used to execute MzScheme commands. The |:mzfile| command can be used to execute an MzScheme script file. Printing multi-byte text *new-print-multi-byte* ------------------ The |:hardcopy| command now supports printing multi-byte characters. The 'printmbcharset' and 'printmbfont' options are used for this. Also see |postscript-cjk-printing|. (Mike Williams) Various new items *new-items-7* ----------------- Normal mode commands: ~ a", a' and a` New text objects to select quoted strings. |a'| i", i' and i' (Taro Muraoka) Options: ~ 'completefunc' The name of a function used for user-specified Insert mode completion. CTRL-X CTRL-U can be used in Insert mode to do any kind of completion. (Taro Muraoka) 'quoteescape' Characters used to escape quotes inside a string. Used for the a", a' and a` text objects. |a'| 'numberwidth' Minimal width of the space used for the 'number' option. (Emmanuel Renieris) 'mzquantum' Time in msec to schedule MzScheme threads. 'printmbcharset' CJK character set to be used for :hardcopy 'printmbfont' font names to be used for CJK output of :hardcopy Ex commands: ~ Win32: The ":winpos" command now also works in the console. (Vipin Aravind) |:startreplace| Start Replace mode. (Charles Campbell) |:0file| Removes the name of the buffer. (Charles Campbell) |:diffoff| Switch off diff mode in the current window or in all windows. |:keepalt| Do not change the alternate file. |:delmarks| Delete marks. New functions: ~ byteidx(expr, nr) |byteidx()| Index of a character. (Ilya Sher) finddir(name) |finddir()| Find a directory in 'path'. findfile(name) |findfile()| Find a file in 'path'. (Johannes Zellner) getfperm(fname) |getfperm()| Get file permission string. (Nikolai Weibull) getftype(fname) |getftype()| Get type of file. (Nikolai Weibull) repeat(expr, count) |repeat()| Repeat "expr" "count" times. (Christophe Poucet) tr(expr, from, to) |tr()| Translate characters. (Ron Aaron) system(cmd, input) |system()| Filters {input} through a shell command. New autocommand events: ~ |InsertEnter| starting Insert or Replace mode |InsertChange| going from Insert to Replace mode or back |InsertLeave| leaving Insert or Replace mode |ColorScheme| after loading a color scheme New items in search patterns: ~ |/\%d| \%d123 search for character with decimal number |/\]| [\d123] idem, in a colletion |/\%o| \%o103 search for character with octal number |/\]| [\o1o3] idem, in a colletion |/\%x| \%x1a search for character with 2 pos. hex number |/\]| [\x1a] idem, in a colletion |/\%u| \%u12ab search for character with 4 pos. hex number |/\]| [\u12ab] idem, in a colletion |/\%U| \%U1234abcd search for character with 8 pos. hex number |/\]| [\U1234abcd] idem, in a colletion (The above partly by Ciaran McCreesh) New Syntax/Indent/FTplugin files: ~ MuPAD source syntax, indent and ftplugin. (Dave Silvia) ABAB/4 syntax file. (Marius van Wyk) SQL-Informix syntax file. (Dean L Hill) PHP compiler plugin. (Doug Kearns) New message translations: ~ The Ukranian messages are now also available in cp1251. Others: ~ Mac: Add the selection type to the clipboard, so that Block, line and character selections can be used between two Vims. (Eckehard Berns) Also fixes the problem that setting 'clipboard' to "unnamed" breaks using "yyp". Mac: GUI font selector. (Peter "Rain Dog" Cucka) The netrw plugin now also supports viewing a directory, when "scp://" is used. Deleting and renaming files is possible. (Charles Campbell) ============================================================================== IMPROVEMENTS *improvements-7* ":helpgrep" accepts a language specifier after the pattern: "pat@it". Move the help for printing to a separate help file. It's quite a lot now. ":breakadd here" and ":breakdel here" can be used to set or delete a breakpoint at the cursor. The tutor was updated to make it simpler to use and added text to explain a few more important commands. Used ideas from Gabriel Zachmann. Unix: When libcall() fails obtain an error message with dlerror() and display it. (Johannes Zellner) Added "nbsp" in 'listchars'. (David Blanchet) Added the "acwrite" value for the 'buftype' option. This is for a buffer that doesn not have a name that refers to a file and is written with BufWriteCmd autocommands. For lisp indenting and matching parenthesis: (Sergey Khorev) - square brackets are recognized properly - #\(, #\), #\[ and #\] are recognized as character literals - Lisp line comments (delimited by semicolon) are recognized Added the "count" argument to match(), matchend() and matchstr(). (Ilya Sher) winnr() takes an optional "$" and "#" arguments. (Nikolai Weibull, Yegappan Lakshmanan) Added 'n' flag to search(): don't move the cursor. (Nikolai Weibull) When uncompressing fails in the gzip plugin, give an error message but don't delete the raw text. Helps if the file has a .gz extension but is not actually compressed. (Andrew Pimlott) When C, C++ or IDL syntax is used, may additionally load doxygen syntax. Also support setting the filetype to "cdoxygen" for C plus doxygen syntax. (Michael Geddes) The ":registers" command now displays multi-byte characters properly. VMS: In the usage message mention that a slash can be used to make a flag upper case. Add color support to the builtin vt320 terminal codes. (Zoltan Arpadffy) For the '%' item in 'viminfo', allow a number to set a maximum for the number of buffers. When a file looks like a shell script, check for an "exec" command that starts the tcl interpreter. (suggested by Alexios Zavras) Support conversion between utf-8 and latin9 (iso-8859-15) internally, so that digraphs still work when iconv is not available. ============================================================================== COMPILE TIME CHANGES *compile-changes-7* Mac: "make" now creates the Vim.app directory and "make install" copies it to its final destination. (Raf) Mac: Made it possible to compile with Motif, Athena or GTK without tricks and still being able to use the MacRoman conversion. Added the os_mac_conv.c file. ============================================================================== BUG FIXES *bug-fixes-7* When using PostScript printing on MS-DOS the default 'printexpr' used "lpr" instead of "copy". When 'printdevice' was empty the copy command did not work. Use "LPT1" then. The GTK font dialog uses a font size zero when the font name doesn't include a size. Use a default size of 10. This example in the documentation didn't work: :e `=foo . ".c" ` Skip over the expression in `=expr` when looking for comments, |, % and #. When ":helpgrep" doesn't find anything there is no error message. "L" and "H" did not take closed folds into account. Win32: The "-P title" argument stopped at the first title that matched, even when it doesn't support MDI. Mac GUI: CTRL-^ and CTRL-@ did not work. "2daw" on "word." at the end of a line didn't include the preceding white space. Win32: Using FindExecutable() doesn't work to find a program. Use SearchPath() instead. For executable() use $PATHEXT when the program searched for doesn't have an extension. When 'virtualedit' is set, moving the cursor up after appending a character may move it to a different column. Was caused by auto-formatting moving the cursor and not putting it back where it was. When indent was added automatically and then moving the cursor, the indent was not deleted (like when pressing ESC). The "I" flag in 'cpoptions' can be used to make it work the old way. When opening a command-line window, 'textwidth' gets set to 78 by the Vim filetype plugin. Reset 'textwidth' to 0 to avoid lines are broken. After using cursor(line, col) moving up/down doesn't keep the same column. Win32: Borland C before 5.5 requires using ".u." for LowPart and HighPart fields. (Walter Briscoe) On Sinix SYS_NMLN isn't always defined. Define it ourselves. (Cristiano De Michele) Printing with PostScript may keep the printer waiting for more. Append a CTRL-D to the printer output. (Mike Williams) When converting a string with a hex or octal number the leading '-' was ignored. ":echo '-05' + 0" resulted in 5 instead of -5. Using "@:" to repeat a command line didn't work when it contains control characters. When using file completion for a user command, it would not expand environment variables like for a regular command with a file argument. 'cindent': When the argument of a #define looks like a C++ class the next line is indented too much. When 'comments' includes multi-byte characters inserting the middle part and alignment may go wrong. 'cindent' also suffers from this for right-aligned items. The default for 'helplang' was "zh" for both "zh_cn" and "zh_tw". Now use "cn" or "tw" as intended. When 'bin' is set and 'eol' is not set then line2byte() added the line break after the last line while it's not there. Using foldlevel() in a WinEnter autocommand may not work. Noticed when resizing the GUI shell upon startup. Python: Using buffer.append(f.readlines()) didn't work. Allow appending a string with a trailing newline. The newline is ignored. When using the ":saveas f2" command for buffer "f1", the Buffers menu would contain "f2" twice, one of them leading to "f1". Also trigger the BufFilePre and BufFilePost events for the alternate buffer that gets the old name. strridx() did not work well when the needle is empty. (Ciaran McCreesh) GTK: Avoid a potential hang in gui_mch_wait_for_chars() when input arrives just before it is invoked VMS: Occasionally CR characters were inserted in the file. Expansion of environment variables was not correct. (Zoltan Arpadffy) UTF-8: When 'delcombine' is set "dw" only deleted the last combining character from the first character of the word. When using ":sball" in an autocommand only the filetype in one buffer was detected. Reset did_filetype in enter_buffer(). When using ":argdo" and the window already was at the first argument index, but not actually editing it, the current buffer would be used instead. When ":next dir/*" includes many matches, adding the names to the argument list may take an awful lot of time and can't be interrupted. Allow interrupting this. When editing a file that was already loaded in a buffer, modelines were not used. Now window-local options in the modeline are set. Buffer-local options and global options remain unmodified. Win32: When 'encoding' is set to "utf-8" in the vimrc file, files from the command line with non-ASCII characters are not used correctly. Recode the file names when 'encoding' is set, using the Unicode command line. Win32 console: When the default for 'encoding' ends up to be "latin1", the default value of 'isprint' was wrong. When an error message is given while waiting for a character (e.g., when an xterm reports the number of colors), the hit-enter prompt overwrote the last line. Don't reset msg_didout in normal_cmd() for K_IGNORE. Mac GUI: Shift-Tab didn't work. When defining tooltip text, don't translate terminal codes, since it's not going to be used like a command. GTK 2: Check the tooltip text for valid utf-8 characters to avoid getting a GTK error. Invalid characters may appear when 'encoding' is changed. GTK 2: Add a safety check for invalid utf-8 sequences, they can crash pango. Win32: When 'encoding' is changed while starting up, use the Unicode command line to convert the file arguments to 'encoding'. Both for the GUI and the console version. Win32 GUI: latin9 text (iso-8859-15) was not displayed correctly, because there is no codepage for latin9. Do our own conversion from latin9 to UCS2. vim:tw=78:ts=8:ft=help:norl: