Vim News

[2025-05-28]

We're excited to share that the Vim project now provides daily ARM64 binaries through the vim-win32-installer repository !

These builds make it easier than ever to run Vim on ARM64 Windows devices.

Happy Vimming!

[2025-05-16]

Vim patch 9.1.1391 adds support for a vertical tabpanel.

Vim patch v9.1.1391 brings support for a vertical tabpanel. This is similar to the tabline feature, but instead of using a single horizontally line to show all tabpages, Vim will use a vertical tabpanel.

You can customize how this should look like when to display the tabpanel and what exactly should be shown using the various tabpanel options ('tabpanel', 'tabpanelopt' and 'showtabpanel' option.)

You can find some examples of how this changes, when looking at the pictures provided at the pull request 17263. This change has been contributed by Naruhiko Nishino, thanks for improving Vim!
Happy Vimming!

[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)