I finally got around to compiling Vim7, and I must say I'm impressed. This is not an invitation for editor flame wars, or claims that M$/other commercial products have been doing this for years now (I will defend those arguments later). For now, I just want to show you guys how awesome Vim7 is.
Two of the most wanted features in Vim have been spell checking and automatic code completion, and Vim7 has excellent support for both of them, and much much more!
Here's a screenshot of code-completion in action. Its on a Python script, but Vim7 includes support for C/C++/Java/CSS/XML/HTML/JS and of course its very easy to add support for other languages (and remember that Vim7 is still in alpha testing officially).
Click on the image to see some notes on the image. And here's a screenshot of the spell checker in the action. Note the curly red lines under the misspelt word and the spell check suggestions:
One important thing to note is that all these functions work both in GUI and console modes. Now, can any of those bulky, bloated IDE's do this? I do a lot of editing over remote shells, and this kind of portability is just perfect for my needs. More on this later.
For now, I'm just pleased that I have Vim7 
8 Comments
Awesome!
@gamehack: you bet! You should check out some of the other neat features (tabs were checked in a few days back) as well (check out my vim and vim7 tags). I’ll post some more screenshots soon.
Thanks for sharing, drool!
You mean Vim will have tabbed browsing???! That is awesome. Post pics please!
Sweeeet! Is there a timeline published somewhere? I can hardly wait…
*@robert*: Errm, I don’t know what you mean by tabbed “browsing”. But yes, it does have tabs. I’ve just posted a screenshot.
*@levi*: Well you know how open source is — it will be released when its ready :-) (well not _all_. Examples: Gnome, Ubuntu, Linux kernel). But seriously, although the current development version is labeled “alpha”, its as stable and usable as my earlier “stable” Vim 6.4 install. So feel free to give it a spin!
Hey, how’d you get the Python autocomplete to work? Been trying to figure it out. Thanks.
*@abhi*: Are you using Vim7? Then it should be enabled by default. Check for pycomplete.vim in your Vim7 distribution. More information at http://phraktured.net/2006/01/23/pycomplete-03/