Vim on Win64 updated
I have updated the Win64 port of Vim. It now includes a working installer, a working "Edit with Vim" shell extension, and the first 195 patches for Vim 7.0. Get it while it's hot!
I have updated the Win64 port of Vim. It now includes a working installer, a working "Edit with Vim" shell extension, and the first 195 patches for Vim 7.0. Get it while it's hot!
I have been cleaning up some issues with the Win64 port of Vim, including the Edit with Vim shell extension not working very well. When I built the shell extension with VS 2005 on x86, I would get the following whenever I right-clicked in Explorer:
Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library Runtime Error! Program: C:\WINDOWS\Explorer.EXE R6034 An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly. Please contact the application's support team for more information.
There was no mention of which application was at fault, though it was obvious in this case. I have also seen some mention of verclsid in the error dialog, though not when I took this snapshot.
The …continue.
More than two years in the making, Vim-7.0 is finally out!
(Vim is Vi IMproved, an enormously enhanced version of the classic Unix editor, vi.)
The main features of the 7.0 release are:
I'm going to take credit for some minor features of Vim 7:
WikiPedia summarizes the history of Vim. This enabled me to pinpoint when I first became a contributor to Vim, back in December 1995. I cleaned up the original, rather buggy port of Vim-3.0 to NT, and posted it to the comp.editors newsgroup. Bram invited me to merge …continue.
We use FlexWiki at work. It's an ASP.NET-based wiki, a low-overhead, organic way of sharing knowledge.
The only built-in means of editing a page in FlexWiki is to type into an HTML textbox, which is a horrendous user experience. There's no WYSIWYG feedback showing you whether you've got the wiki markup right.
Back in December, Emma and I went to the Oregon coast for a week. We had no Internet access and long dark evenings, so I spent quite a bit of time on my laptop, working on a couple of projects. One was a new theme (skin) for DasBlog, which I didn't finish to my satisfaction. I really ought to …continue.
I've ported Vim to Win64. Native binaries for AMD64 can be found on my Vim page.
In the end, it wasn't all that hard. Last weekend, I fixed approximately 400 warnings that were thrown up by the x86_amd64 cross compiler. Most of them were due to the widening of size_t (especially the value returned from strlen()) and ptrdiff_t to 64-bits. Several years ago, I went through a similar exercise in fixing these warnings for Vim6, but I never finished the port.
This week, I scrounged access to an AMD64 box at work. Today, I turned on the /Wp64 flag, which found several new, subtler problems, where pointers where being truncated to …continue.
I've been an obsessive vi user for more than 20 years. Vi keystrokes are indelibly burned into my muscle memory. When I have to use Notepad or Word or Visual Studio, I feel crippled. I have to work harder to do simple things; I have to type too many chords with Alt and Ctrl; I have to take my hands off the home keys to use the cursor keys and the mouse.
In the mid-90s, I adopted Vim (Vi IMproved) to the point where I became a significant contributor, writing a big chunk of the Win32 code.
While I was at Microsoft, I hardly ever used Visual …continue.
I've been trying to make Vim 7 compile with the Microsoft Visual C++ 2003 Toolkit, as a favor to Bram Moolenaar, the primary author of Vim. He wants to be able to use the free compiler as the primary build tool for the Win32 version of Vim.
Oh. My. God.
The VC2003 toolkit may include a full optimizing compiler, but it's certainly far from a complete system for building Windows binaries.
First, I discovered that it came only with the C library headers, but not the Windows headers. That was easily rectified. Download the Platform SDK. Just the Windows Core SDK subset. This also got me nmake.
At this point, I was able to …continue.
vi. Vee-eye. My text editor of choice for 20 years. Half my life.
Why? Because I imprinted on vi, like a duckling on its mother. Vi's keystrokes are bound into my muscle memory. My fingers reflexively use vi keystrokes to move around, to delete text, to move blocks, to find patterns. I don't have to think about using dw to delete a word, or n to find the next match of a pattern, or yG to yank the rest of a file, or j to move down a line, or . to repeat the last modification. My subconcious does it for me.
I don't even have to think much about more complex commands, like ct) to …continue.