Brace yourself: Spell checking in vi?
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
Disclaimer: I imprinted on the vi editor on a Unix system in 1990 and never could bring myself to figure out Emacs.
But I am not alone in my preferences. The text editor ships in one form or another with every Unix, Linux or BSD system out there, and sysadmins can count on it even when X servers give up the ghost, network connections are too pokey or fancier editors aren't installed. So loyalists will be delighted to know that one widely used incarnation--Vim, short for vi improved--has been upgraded to version 6.4. Vim, an open-source program, ships with Linux from Red Hat, Novell and many others, and Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems make it available for their versions of Unix.
Granted, the new version consists mostly of a bunch of bug fixes. But according to VIM's main programmer, Bran Moolenaar, more dramatic changes could be in store if people fund his work enough to produce version 7.
"If I keep getting donations from sponsors and registered Vim users, I will be able to add several 'big' features. One of the new features is spell checking," he said in the Vim 6.4 announcement. "It already works quite well."
Moolenaar lets those who contribute at least 10 euros to the project vote for new features in Vim.