First look at Vim 7

I should be pretty upfront in saying that Vim does little for me personally. Still, I can see how users could definitely get into using it as it is quite configurable.

The final release of Vim 7 is just around the corner, and it brings a number of new features to the venerable editor, including spell checking, omni completion for several programming and markup languages, tab pages, undo branches, and several other features that are worth upgrading for.

To test Vim, I compiled the 7.0f beta release on Ubuntu Breezy and used it for my day-to-day work for several days. I had been using Vim 6.3, so moving to Vim 7.0 wasn’t too drastic. I was relieved to find that I didn’t run into any show-stopper bugs or instability while I was working with Vim. It hasn’t eaten any files, and none of the new features exhibit major bugs.

Let’s take a look at what’s new in 7.0.

Spellcheck

Despite the fact that I think spellcheckers are overrated, they come in handy from time to time for spotting typos and errors that you might not catch by eyeballing a file. Spellchecking doesn’t prevent people from using “it’s” when they mean “its,” but having a spellchecker does help catch some potentially embarrassing errors.

Plugins that enable spellcheck for Vim have been available for some time, but this is the first release with on-the-fly spellcheck available as part of Vim itself. As you type, Vim will highlight any word that’s misspelled after the word is completed. Vim also highlights words at the beginning of a sentence if they’re not capitalized. If you’re using GVim, the GUI version of the software, you’ll see a red squiggly line under misspelled words rather than solid highlighting.

Vim’s spellcheck feature also identifies rare words and words that may be spelled correctly, but which are out of sync with your region. For example, Vim alerts me to the use of colour rather than color, and optimise rather than optimize. Vim also detects some double words, which is a nice touch.

I found the keybindings for spellcheck relatively easy to remember. When spellchecking is turned on, ]s will move to the next misspelled word, and [s will move to the previous one. To add a word to the dictionary, use zg, and use z= to see suggestions. zug will undo an addition to the dictionary, in case you accidentally approve a misspelled word.

Unfortunately, the spellchecking feature and syntax highlighting didn't seem to like one another in Vim, though they seemed to work just fine in GVim. When working with HTML files and syntax highlighting turned on, the spellchecking feature didn't work properly at all. If I turned syntax highlighting off, though, everything was fine. It's not that difficult to turn syntax highlighting off before enabling spellchecking, but it'd be nice if both features worked at the same time.... Source: Linux.com

[tags]vim 7,spellcheck,gui version,gvim[/tags]