Subject: Vim version 6.0ac ALPHA available
From: Bram Moolenaar <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 21:08:55 +0200

Nothing spectacular this time.

Note: ftp.vim.org might still be busy
(because of a new Red Hat release).

Major changes
-------------

Added the CTRL-Y command in Cmdline-mode to copy the modeless selection to the
clipboard.  Also works at the hit-enter prompt and the more prompt.
The modeless selection no longer has an implied automatic copy to the
clipboard.  It now obeys the 'a' flag in 'guioptions' or "autoselect" in
'clipboard'.
Now use the Cmdline-mode menus for the hit-enter prompt instead of the Normal
mode menus.  This generally works better and allows using the "Copy" menu to
produce CTRL-Y to copy the modeless selection.

Added the inputdialog() function: like input() but uses a GUI dialog when
possible.  Currently only works for Motif, Athena and GTK.  Please implement
it for other systems!
Use inputdialog() for the Edit/Settings/Text Width menu.  Also for the
Help/Find.. and Toolbar FindHelp items.
Removed the GTK implementation of ":findhelp", it now uses the
ToolBar.FindHelp menu entry.

Other changes
-------------

The Cmdline-mode menus can be used at the more-prompt.  This mostly works
fine, because they start with a CTRL-C.  The "Copy" menu works to copy the
modeless selection.  Allows copying the output of ":set all" or ":intro"
without auto-selection by using a menu entry.

b:browsefilter and g:browsefilter can be set to the filters used for the file
dialog.  Supported for Win32 and Motif GUI. (Dan Sharp)

Added the ":checktime" command: Check for changed buffers.
No longer warn for a changed directory.  This avoids that the file explorer
produces warnings.
Checking timestamps is only done for buffers that are not hidden.  These will
be checked when they become unhidden.

When the XIM is active, show "XIM" in the 'showmode' message. (Nam SungHyun)

Added Cmdline completion for the ":language" command ("messages" and "ctype").

Added ":setlocal name<" to set an option value back to its global value.

Fixes
-----

Compiling the Ruby interface with Mingw required some fixes. (Benoit Cerrina)

":vert cwindow" changed the height of the window next to it.

Truncating the window title by putting "..." in the middle didn't work
correctly.

The Paste menu item in the menu bar, the popup menu and the toolbar were all
different.  Now made them all equal to how it was done in mswin.vim.

When redrawing had to remove highlighting for a Visual selection and scroll
down for a message at the same time, not all highlighting was removed.

The vimtutor was not using the name for the target as specified for the
Makefile (or by configure).

'cindent': A line before a function would be indented even when terminated
with a semicolon. (Meikel Brandmeyer)
'cindent' gave too much indent to a line after a "};" that ends an array init.

Unix: "ZZ" didn't always put the cursor in the first column.

Multi-byte:
- A regexp that uses a "*" after a multi-byte character didn't work correctly.
  (Yasuhiro Matsumoto)
- Using "\t" in a substitution string didn't result in a TAB.
- When dynamically loading iconv.dll, don't use msvcrtd.dll when debugging
  Vim, because iconv.dll was linked against msvcrt.dll. (Muraoka Taro)
- Win32: Displaying Unicode with composing characters didn't work, the
  character under the composing character wasn't drawn.
- When there is a horizontal scrollbar, 'wrap' is off and using a multi-byte
  character at the end of the line Vim could hang.

st_dev can be smaller than "unsigned".  The compiler may give an overflow
warning.  Added a configure check for dev_t.

Athena: closing a confirm() dialog killed Vim.

Various typos in the documentation. (Matt Dunford)

When scrolling down to make the cursor line visible, there was an off-by-one
error that could make the cursor appear below the window.

GUI: When setting a font for the "Menu" highlight group, but no colors, the
default text area colors would be used for the menubar.  Now only use the
colors that have been specified. (David Harrison)

Python interface: The definition of _DEBUG could cause trouble, undefine it.
The error message for not being able to load the shared library wasn't
translated.  (Muraoka Taro)

A mapping for CTRL-N was displayed as <y>.

When 'selection' is exclusive, using CTRL-C to copy the selection and then
reselecting the text made the selection one character longer.

Win32: i^Vu<BS> crashed Vim.  isxdigit() can't handle a negagive number.

A few fixes for the Mac port. (Axel Kielhorn)

":setglobal" arguments were not always checked for correctness.

":setglobal foldmethod=manual" freed a wrong pointer (could cause a crash).

Epilogue
--------

WARNING: This is really an unstable version.  Many things have been added
without proper testing.  It does crash.  It may destroy your work.  New
features may change incompatibly in the next version.

This version is for developers, thus it comes as source code only.
If you run into something that doesn't work, please try to figure out why,
try to solve it and send me a patch.  If you can't do that, at least send me
precise information to save me time.

More info about the new 6.0 features with ":help version6".

If you don't like the syntax of a command, the name of an option or how the
new features work, let's discuss this in the vim-dev maillist.

Lots of things are not working yet.  Check ":help todo" for known items.

I NEED YOUR HELP: There is still a lot of work to be done.  If I have to do it
all by myself it will take a very long time until Vim.6.0 is ready.  Please
give a hand by implementing one of the items in the todo list.

You can find Vim 6.0 here: ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unreleased/

unix/vim-6.0ac-rt.tar.gz	runtime files
unix/vim-6.0ac-rt.tar.bz2	same, compressed with bzip2
unix/vim-6.0ac-src.tar.gz	sources
unix/vim-6.0ac-src.tar.bz2	same, compressed with bzip2

extra/vim-6.0ac-extra.tar.gz	extra files
extra/vim-6.0ac-lang.tar.gz	multi-language files

Happy Vimming!