Subject: Vim version 6.0ag ALPHA available
From: Bram Moolenaar <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 19:51:21 +0200

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

Sun Workshop integration:
- Make signs work outside of the GUI.  Can define an ASCII sign of two
  characters, e.g., ">>" for the current line, "!!" for a breakpoint.
- Changed the syntax of the ":sign" command.  Removed ":signs" and ":unsign".
- Added "icon=" argument for ":menu".  Allows defining a specific icon for a
  ToolBar item.  Removed the Workshop-specific paths.
- Fixed many redraw problems.
- Adjust the sign positions when inserting/deleting lines.
- Updated the documentation.

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

":hi clear" no longer changes the value of 'background'.  This allows making a
color scheme that selects light or dark default colors.
For ":set bg&" guess the value.  This allows a color scheme to switch back to
the default colors.
When syntax highlighting is switched on and a color scheme was defined, reload
the color scheme to define the colors.

MSDOS: A pattern *.* previously also matched a file name without a dot.  This
was inconsistent with other versions.

Line highlighting in the quickfix window and for +workshop now continues until
the right border of the window.

Printing:
- Added a few error messages. (Paul Moore)
- Support printing for Win16.  Moved the code from os_win32.c to os_mswin.c.
  (Vince Negri)
- Added a first throw at printing PostScript. (Vince Negri)

Added the 'iminsert' and 'imsearch' options: Specify use of langmap mappings
and Input Method with an option. (Muraoka Taro)

Merged a large part of os_vms.c with os_unix.c.  The code was duplicated in
the past which made maintenance more work.  (Zoltan Arpadffy)

vimdiff:  Add "hor" to 'scrollopt' when starting.

Added ":redraw": redraw the screen even when busy with a script or function.

Fixes
-----

Compiling with Mingw didn't work. (Ron Aaron)

":harcopy" didn't work with multi-byte characters. (Muraoka Taro, Yasuhiro
Matsumoto)

Opening the command-line window with syntax highlighting on generated an error
message.  Allow using a user command in the command-line window.

Don't define the <NetMouse> termcode in an xterm, reduces the problem when
someone types <Esc> } in Insert mode.

Made slash_adjust() work correctly for multi-byte characters. (Yasuhiro
Matsumoto)

When a file is edited through a symbolic or hard link and it is read-only,
":w!" would delete the link and write a new file in its place.  That might not
be what the user expected, give an error message instead.

VMS doesn't always have lstat(), added an #ifdef around it.

When a command typed in debug mode caused an error, the did_emsg flag was
clobbered and the debugged code could work differently.

"\?" in a regexp didn't work, it was not in META[].
":help /\?" didn't work.

"echo {" crashed.

Virtual edit: "x" on a control character didn't do anything. (Chase Tingley)

When using "zl" or "zh" to scroll sideways and 'sidescrolloff' is non-zero,
the screen would jump back when the cursor comes close to the side.

Unix: When a file is read-only, but the 'readonly' option isn't set, ":w"
overwrote it when 'backupcopy' is "no" or "auto".  Now do an extra check for
a read-only file like it was already done for systems that rename the file to
make a backup.

DOS and Windows: Expanding *.vim also matched file.vimfoo.  Expand path like
Unix to avoid problems with Windows dir functions.  Merged the DOS and Win32
functions.

When unloading a buffer, the buffer-local user commands were deleted.  That's
unexpected, since buffer-local variables are kept.

Win32: Gvimext could not edit more than a few files at once, the length of the
argument was fixed.

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

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

Happy Vimming!