Vim News

[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)