Re: Vim 6.0 has been released (debian info)

["Thomas E. Dickey" <dickey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Glenn Maynard wrote:

> > The first version of the classic VI editor with proper UTF-8 support has
> > completed beta testing and has been released now officially: Vim 6.0.
>
> Just thought I'd point out to Debian users: you need to install one of
> the "heavy" versions (ie vim-gtk) to get this.  "vim" itself doesn't
> have it compiled in.  (Yes, that means you need to install a few GTK/X
> packages, and it'll blow Vim up about a meg per instance and about three
> megs SHM as a result, though it'll work fine out of X.)  The
> alternative is compiling it yourself, of course ... not a very good
> one, though, defeating the convenience of apt.
>
> I did point this out to the Debian vim maintainer; he claims he wants the
> "vim" package to be minimal and suggests the above; I gave a few arguments
> for it, but havn't received any response yet (it's only been two days.)

He did respond (read the bug-tracking item).  Since vim + UTF-8 wouldn't
be effective in the console, and only with xterm, there's little advantage
even to making a new vim-utf8 package.

> Not understanding the importance of UTF8 is an easy enough mistake to make,
> of course, but this inconveniences non-X users a lot.  (I also don't know why he
> did away with vim-tiny, if he wants a minimalist version available--all
> there is now, effectively, is vim-tiny and vim-huge-and-bloated.)
>
> Now if we can just get kernel, screen, ncurses, slang, and readline
> support, I'd be all set. :)

There's enough ncurses support for people to write applications against
(but few people willing to spend time on it).

-- 
T.E.Dickey <dickey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net

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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/