Subject: Vim 6.0g alpha available
From: Bram Moolenaar <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 20:38:35 +0200

Yet another Vim in the 6.0 series.

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

Added the 'backupcopy' option: Select whether a file is copied or renamed to
make a backup file.
NOTE: The default is "auto", which means that on Unix the backup is now
created by renaming the original file and the file is written as a new file.
But this doesn't happen if the file is a (hard/symbolic) link or the
owner/group can't be set properly.
PLEASE CHECK that this doesn't cause trouble when writing a file.  Since the
file is not always overwritten, some special attributes may be lost.

It is now possible to add your own help files:
- When searching for help tags, all "doc/tags" files in 'runtimepath' are
  used.  'helpfile' is no longer used to find the help tags file.
- Added the ":helptags" command: Generate a tags file for a help directory.
- Automagically add the first line of local help files to the "LOCAL
  ADDITIONS" section in help.txt.
See |add-local-help|.

The window title now has "VIM" on the end.  The file name comes first, useful
in the taskbar.  A "+" is added when the file is modified.

Added 'sidescrolloff' option: like 'scrolloff' but horizontally. (Utz-Uwe
Haus)

Added "scratch" for 'buftype'.  Buffer which is deleted when it is not
displayed in a window.  Used for the option-window. (Utz-Uwe Haus)

The 'listchars' option has been extended with the "preceeds" item, to show a
"<" for example, when there is text left off the screen. (Utz-Uwe Haus)

Win32: GvimExt can now also edit a file with an already running Vim. (Tianmio
Hu)
Added ":drop" command, to be used for the new GvimExt functionality.

Added 'menulang' option: Language to be used for menu translations.  This
overrules the default from $LANG.  You can use the English menus when $LANG is
set to German, and the other way around.

Minor changes
-------------

On non-Unix systems: When expanding wildcards for the Vim arguments, don't use
'suffixes'.  It now works as if the shell had expanded the arguments.

":syn keyword" now accepts "display" as a keyword.  This avoids
incompatibilities for a number of syntax files.

Renamed all the menu translation files to make them lower case.  This allows
us to ignore case in the locale name.

The menu translation files are now found in 'runtimepath' so that users can
add their own translations.

Fixed: For syntax highlighting, When "minlines" was zero, it started parsing
at the last displayed line.  ":e vim.vim" then "G" was very slow, it parsed
all lines.

Fixed: ":sview" and ":view" didn't set 'readonly' for an existing buffer.  Now
do set 'readonly', unless the buffer is also editied in another window.

Fixed: When dragging the Visual selection with the mouse, the text didn't
scroll if only the last line is on the screen.

Fixed: When 'showbreak' is set, it was not displayed when the line contains a
TAB.

Fixed: When starting Vim and doing ":make" immediately, the cursor wasn't
displayed after the hit-return prompt but topleft.  Also could sometimes see
response to xterm termcap requests.

Fixed: ":setglobal" crashed.

Fixed: GTK GUI: When 'guioptions' excluded 'g', the more prompt caused the
toolbar and menubar to disappear and resize the window (which clears the
text).  Now always grey-out the toplevel menus to avoid that the menubar
changes size or disappears.

Conclusion
----------

WARNING: This is really an unstable version.  Many things have been added
without proper testing.  It does crash.  It may destroy your work.

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.

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.

More info for the new 6.0 features at ":help version6".

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 it here: ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unreleased/

unix/vim-6.0g-rt.tar.gz		runtime files
unix/vim-6.0g-src.tar.gz	sources

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

Happy Vimming!