I am curious what "add IDE features" means. It seems like a wide-open feature request.<p>A few things I can think of:<p>* Better support for background tasks .. :mak, :grep, system(), :! without interrupting editing.<p>* Fancier errorlist and locationlists. cexpr()/lexpr() really make you fit round pegs into square holes.<p>* Better omni-completion performance (any completion dialogs other than <C-N>, buffer keyword completion, are unusably slow for my purposes).<p>* Built-in support for some filesystem operations. NERD_tree/:! can be clunky, and dropping into the shell isn't always ideal.<p>* Real shell buffer .. I know I'll get my head cut off for this because it is quite emacs-y, but it would be nice to be able to run my shell in a buffer. At the very least, it would be nice to have :sh be a somewhat capable terminal that could handle colors and generally feel like a normal terminal.<p>I'm excited to see 7.4 because it looks like some real new direction for the project, for better or worse. I'm sad to see VimScript de-emphasized, having invested a good bit of time in getting good with it, but VimScript is pretty slow, so this is good news.
With the development beeing rather slow as it is, wouldn't Vim benefit more from improving the whole community aspect as well as connectivity?<p>I still use Vim, but it is a bit annoying to see well done solutions I've been using for years fall behind new projects (Hello Firebug) that accomplish more in a year than others in 20 years.<p>If Sublime Text was Open Source and the vi mode better I'd switch in an instant. And probably a lot of people too.<p>I don't want to sound snobbish and arguing without helping isn't the way to go in the open source community, but man, all that stuff that has been in development for so long, thought of in dusty university rooms, presented in worn 70's summer dresses...<p>It reminds me of the old tailor couple around the corner. They wont go away and probably have a lot of years to life left. A handful of people still value their skill and love to pay more. But it's an old house that hasn't been painted for a long time. You will only find it in the yellow pages and even then you're having trouble to actually find the shop because it's tiny and the house looks like it's soon to be demolished. The machines they use are old and they are the only ones who actually know how to fix them. If they die the shop is gone for good.<p>The same goes trough my head when I look at Vim's homepage, or Molenaars. They look like someone died or moved on to a life without the internet.<p>They don't make the impression that anything of value can be found. But in some places there is, scrambled across different pages by different people of different generations. Modern technology hammered into old shells. A reminder here that scripts can also be found on git. A wiki hosted on wikia there. GUI builds for Mac here, Windows there, none using any new features of the OS. It still runs, but there isn't really any love put into it.<p>If people talk about Vim plugins I only hear how bad VimScript is. If I install one I get it on github, not the script repository because that's where the skeletons lie. The installer I use (and the only one up-to-date) is made by the cream developers. No clue what I'd even do if they stopped producing them.<p>Vim became the double-edge razor a long time ago. It's cheap, it just works and I can pass it down to my kids. All it needs is some learning. But it's only noteworthy because every other kind of razor produced today sucks in one way or another.
I'm not sure about IDE features. The whole reason I use vim in the first place is precisely because it's <i>not</i> an IDE. I don't want integration, I want unix instead. It's the same reason I use dwm for my desktop setup and configure everything by hand as opposed to using a desktop environment. I want technically simple software. Right now I could already easily configure/integrate vim to use gdb, gcc, git, jshint, etc. using vimscript. I prefer that over hardcoded integration. I'm just curious what's meant by IDE features. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it. At the end of the day, I trust Bram. He's created an amazing text editor and maintained it for more than 20 years.
Still motivated and eager to make improvements (and not really trivial ones) to his (free!) software after so many years to the benefit of the whole software community.<p>Kudos to Bram Moolenaar.
Version numbers are infuriating. Dates don't overflow, people! If you're doing incremental development that doesn't have a concept of a "stable release", just use dates. This applies to projects like Firefox and the Linux kernel. I was pretty annoyed when Linus went with 3.x. Eventually, it's going to run into the same problem 2.6.x did. Date-based versioning would have lasted forever!
The number one thing I'd want in vim is support for Multi Cursors, ala Sublime Text. This is something that's very hard to get right with a vim plugin, but could probably be added to core vim much more easily.
Things that I really appreciate in the list:<p>* add IDE features (debugger integration, shell window)<p>* add integration with Python instead of inventing more Vim script<p>* add encryption for the swapfile<p>And something that could be included in that list:<p>* Built-in support for multiple cursors
Just because people who follow the vim google group want more ide features and python integration doesn't mean thats what most vim users want. Why don't they fix the obvious flaw, mouse integration? (I know, because it would be hard)
1. Expand the vim philosophy to be a whole OS UI experience, be able to control all apps on the screen using vim controls.<p>2. jokes aside, the most important need is probably better repl: eval result should pop up on screen.