MacFormat 1995 March/macformat-022.iso/Shareware City/Applications/vim/mac docs

Text File | 1994-11-22 | 17.0 KB | 409 lines | [TEXT/VIM!]

VIM Release Notes
Initial Macintosh release, VIM version 3.0
19 October 1994

Eric Fischer
[e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail]
5759 N. Guilford Ave
Indianapolis IN 46220 USA



I've tried to test Vim under as many conditions as possible, but
there are certainly bugs and incompatibilities which still exist.
If it doesn't work on your machine, sorry...  but if you'll let
me know what's wrong with it, I'll try to fix it.

Vim has been verified to perform at least its most basic of functions
on Quadras 650 and 660AV, PowerMac 6100, and Macintosh IIci, all under
System 7.5.  It also definitely works on my Quadra 605 (System 7.1,
virtual memory enabled).

It has been verified *not* to perform its most basic of functions on
my roommate's Mac Plus (System 6, no hard disk).  The editor actually
worked -- it was just saving and loading files that broke (see below).

See the file uganda.txt for Bram Moolenaar's requests with regard to
redistributing Vim.  Since Think C was used to compile the Mac version,
Symantec copyright applies to the standard libraries included as part
of this distribution.

I hope that if you give copies to other people you'll include this
file so that people will know why the Mac version works the way it
does and so they can get bug reports and such back to me.

Thanks to Alain Roy and Corey Liss for beta testing.


Vim Doesn't Run Right Under System 6
--- ------- --- ----- ----- ------ -

I don't know why, though.  You can edit text, but you can't load or
save it.  It does, however, feature the most informative system bomb
dialog I've ever seen in all my days of Macintosh use: when you do
a command that would open a Standard File dialog box, it bombs and
tells you that the trap is missing, which it is in System 6.  Quite
a refreshing change from the usual meaningless "The application
``unknown'' has unexpectedly quit with an error of type 1"...

Feel free to try it with System 5 or System 4 and tell me how it goes,
though I have no great hopes...  Pre-HFS Systems I think are definitely
a lost cause.



Since Vim was originally written to operate on computers very different
from Macintoshes, there are some changes from the "traditional" behavior
that you should be aware of.

File System Support
---- ------ -------

One really majorly different thing about the Macintosh and Unix systems
is the way the file systems work.  Both are nominally hierarchical systems,
but while Unix does everything by directory names, the Mac system software
prefers to refer to disks and directories by reference number.

Since Vim needs to be able to use ordinary text strings to refer to files,
instead of the Macintosh FSSpec data structure, a compromise is made:
whenever a file is selected in a Macintosh-style way (with the Open…,
Insert…, or Save As… menu items), the FSSpec returned to the program is
converted into a text string, and when a file is written or read, the text
string that Vim uses for the name is turned back into an FSSpec.

In the earliest versions (about a week ago) this was done by searching the
directory tree for each parent folder of the one you're interested in and
returning a stream of folder names, for instance

   disk:Desktop Folder:vim ƒ:doc:mac documentation

or whatever.  For short paths, this works great.  For long paths, it's
a real problem, because several of the Mac file system routines are
limited to strings 63 characters long.  Back to the drawing board...

What Vim does now is to take the numerical fields that are part of the
FSSpec structure and convert them into ASCII format so that they can be
passed to the Unixy parts of Vim, then convert them directly back to
FSSpecs when saving Macintosh files, without going through the entire
directory structure.  So the file mentioned above would be referred to
(on my Mac) as

   -1:6193:mac documentation

where -1 is the volume number (it's drive number one) and 6193 is the
folder number (I guess this means the 6193rd folder on my hard drive).
It's kinda ugly, but it *works*, which is more important, in my
humble opinion.

Special directories
------- -----------

There are also a few special-purpose directories defined for the sake
of easy access to special files.  "s:" is defined as meaning the
Preferences folder on your startup disk (s stands for System), and
"t:" the Temporary Items folder, where Vim's swap files are stored
when memory gets low.  You can use these if you want, though there's
not really much reason to except for quick access to your _exrc
file (s:_exrc).

If you chance to specify a filename without a path, the ordinary Mac
file system search path takes effect.  This essentially means that
for *reading* files it will find them in the directory from which you
launched Vim or in your System Folder, while for *writing* them they'll
turn up in the folder you launched Vim from.

File conversion
---- ----------

There's one other substantial difference between the way Unix handles
files and the way the Macintosh does: on Unix, control-J is the newline
character, while on the Mac, the character is control-M.  In Vim, this
conversion is handled transparently whenever you save a file: any ^M
characters in your file are turned into ^Js, and the newlines end up
as Mac carriage returns.  The same thing happens, in reverse, when
you open a file: all the ^Ms in the file become newlines in the editor,
and all the ^Js in the file show up as ^Ms which will be turned back
into ^Js when you save.  Ordinary text, including Mac special characters,
passes through unscathed.

The only time this makes much of a difference in practice is in files
of Vim macros.  If there are any references to ^M in the macro (for
instance to end a : command or search, or to remap the action of the
Return key) this will be saved in the file as ^J.  If you then copy
the file in "text mode" by FTP to another variety of computer, you
stand a good chance of both ^J *and* ^M ending up as whatever the
destination computer's newline character is, screwing up the
functioning of your macro.  It's not something you need to worry
about much, but something you should be aware of.


Macintosh Menus
--------- -----

In order to make this a usable Macintosh program, Vim has to support
the basic menus that Mac programs are supposed to have.  I'll describe
them in order:

    Apple menu
        About Vim…
            This puts up a dialog box telling Bram Moolenaar's and my
            e-mail addresses.

        Help…
            This executes the Vim command, :help.  See below for the
            help file information.

    File menu
        New Subwindow
            This opens a new window inside the Vim window, in which
            you can edit text or do whatever you'd do in a full-screen
            vi.  See windows.doc for more information about how Vim
            does windows; this command does Control-W n.

        Open…
            Puts up a Macintosh file selector dialog.  If you don't
            cancel, types :new <filename> to edit your file.

        Open in the Same Subwindow…
            Does the same as Open…, but types :vi <filename> instead.

        Insert…
            Yet another file-opening dialog; this one does :r.

        Close
            Types :q, which closes the current window, leaving the
            others intact.

        Save
            Types :w.

        Save A Copy As…
            Puts up a Macintosh dialog for saving files, then, if it's
            not cancelled, types :w! <filename>

        Quit
            Types :qall.

    Edit menu
        Undo
            Types u

        Redo
            Types Control-R

        Previous Subwindow
            Types Control-W k

        Next Subwindow
            Types Control-W j

    Font and Size menus
        do what you'd expect them to do.

Most of these commands also type Escape before doing their job, to ensure
that you're not inserting text or typing a search or : command on the
bottom of the screen when they execute.  Until you press a key, beeps
(either real or visual) are disabled so that you don't get the speaker
beeping or the window flashing every time you use a menu item.

Vim responds to Open Apple Events with :vi <filename> for the first file,
:new <filename> for the rest.  It responds to a Quit Apple Event with :qall.

Mouse use
----- ---

The mouse gets to be used for a bit more than just selecting from menus,
too.  One job it has is resizing the Vim window, which happens when you
drag on the lower-right corner of the window.  It works just like a
regular Macintosh grow box, but it's not visible.  A gross violation of
Human Interface Guidelines, of course, but so is the general way vi
works...

The mouse can also be used to move the cursor inside the window.  This
doesn't work quite as well as I'd like, because the up arrow and down
arrow move by *file* line instead of by *screen* line, but it does a
pretty good job.  And (as suggested by Alain Roy), if you click where
the cursor already is and start dragging, the Vim visual select mode
(the v command) is turned on and the region you drag through is selected
for use by any of the visual mode commands.  Clicking again removes the
selection and moves the cursor toward where you clicked.

The cursor movement, by the way, is not instantaneous -- you need to hold
down the button for a small fraction of a second until the cursor gets
there.  This has the useful side effect that you can click the mouse
button and then move above or below the edge of the window and have a
scrolling selection just like any other Mac program.  Not as fast as
using the paging keys, but nice for quickly looking through a file.

Macintosh Keys
--------- ----

Currently the Mac arrow keys *are* supported in Vim but the other movement
keys (Help, Forward Delete, Home, End, Page Up, Page Down) and the
function keys on the top row are *not*.  A future release should remedy
this, I hope.  There isn't really any support for old Macs that don't
have Escape and Control keys, either, though the Control-C that the
Enter key sends can usually be used in place of Escape.

The usual Option-key combinations can be used to type Macintosh special
high-ASCII characters.  If you want all of them to appear normally on
the screen, make sure to :set graphic, because otherwise Vim will assume
some of them to be control characters instead of actual real ones and
display them as ~@, ~A, ..., ~Z instead of what they really should be.

Fonts and Sizes
----- --- -----

Vim has fairly minimal support for changing fonts and sizes.  The default
is Monaco-9, but you can select your favorite font and size from the menus.
Monospaced fonts all work fine, but proportional ones will probably look
a bit bizarre, since almost all your letters, numbers, and symbols will
certainly be either wider or narrower than the space they have been
allotted.  Proportional text is also considerably slower than monospaced,
since Vim must move to *each* character position and draw a single character
rather than spewing out a full line in one fell swoop as it can do with
monospaced type.  But if you want to edit in Zapf Chancery 36, you can do
it...

If you don't like Monaco-9 (who does?), you can set a font and size that
you do like in your _exrc file (see below).  You can also do it from
the : command line if you really want to.  Mac Vim, since it only supports
the computer console, uses the term variable to set the font and size,
so, for instance you could set the font and size to Helvetica 17 with

   :set term=helvetica
   :set term=17

The font and size menus aren't done very carefully and don't have the check
marks and outlining a proper Mac program should put on them.  Also, if you
have a font named "17" (or any other number) it'll be misinterpreted as a
size instead.

The window size can also be set from the keyboard, for instance if you
want a different default than the standard 80x25 one.  You could set
it to 90x10 with

  :set lines=10
  :set rows=90

or whatever other numbers you enjoy.


System Files
------ -----

Vim is pretty much self-contained.  There are only two instances where
it absolutely needs an external support file: to get configuration
information at startup, and to get the help file.  It also uses files
for virtual memory and backups while editing files.

The search path for startup files goes as follows:

   s:_vimrc
   s:_exrc
   _vimrc  (if :set exrc)
   _exrc   (if :set exrc)

This means that first it looks in the Preferences folder for first _vimrc
and then _exrc, then in the Vim startup folder for the same.  The reason
there are both _vimrc and _exrc files is because on a Unix system you
might want different configuration settings for Vim and Ex, and Ex will
ignore the .vimrc, and Vim the .exrc (if there's a .vimrc).  There's no
Ex on the Macintosh, but you can still use its name if you want.  I've
enclosed a sample _exrc that sets Vim to work the way I want it to,
but feel free not to use it.

The other file Vim needs is called vim.hlp, and is just referred to as
vim.hlp, with no pathname at all.  This means that you can keep it
either in your Vim startup folder or in your System Folder.  It
won't be found in the Prefences folder, though.  The vim.hlp file is
used by the :help command and the Help… menu item.

While you're editing files, Vim creates swap files called <filename>_swp
in your Temporary Items directory.  These are used to allow you to make
more changes to files than would reasonably fit in memory and still allow
lots of undos.  If you prefer your swap files to go somewhere else, you
can :set directory= the directory where you want them to go (make sure
to include a '>' at the start of the name to force it there) or set
it to null to make the swap files go in the same directory as the file
you're editing.

Vim also creates backup files for files you save, by default.  If you
don't like this, :set nobackup and it'll stop cluttering up your
directories with backup files.  Probably a future version should make
the word "bak" (or whatever) go at the start of the name instead of
the end, because none of the Finder views are especially useful for
selecting all the files that *end* with a particular string.


What Vim Doesn't Do
---- --- ------- --

The Mac port doesn't support printing, pipes to external filters, filename
globbing, filename completion in : commands, or external shells.  It also
doesn't support proper Mac-style Copy and Paste.  All of these go on the
Maybe Someday list.

There's no mapping of another key to Control to support those old Macs
without Control keys.  The Enter key sends a Control-C and can usually
be used in place of Escape, though.

Vim's digraph feature isn't supported.  You'll have to use the usual
Mac option-keys to type extended ASCII characters.  :set graphic
if you want them to all show up properly.

A major problem is that the Mac interface doesn't really have a clue
about any of the internal data structures, mostly because *I* don't
have much of a clue about the internal data structures.  Almost everything
that the Mac interface does is by faking keystrokes to the parts of
Vim that do the real work.  This is functional, but probably the wrong
way to go about things in the long run.

A more pressing problem is that Vim is, at its heart, not a Macintosh
program.  It allocates all its memory with malloc(), not NewHandle(),
so when memory gets low, there's not much it can do.  Fortunately, the
swapping is smart enough that memory doesn't get too badly fragmented,
but if you do really large deletes and pastes, it's possible that Vim
will fill up its partition and be unable to continue.

As the MS-DOS documentation puts it,
> A swap file is used to store most of the text. You should be able to edit
> very large files. However, memory is used for undo and other things. If you
> delete a lot of text you can still run out of memory.
>
> If Vim gives an "Out of memory" warning you should stop editing. Result of
> further editing actions is unpredictable. Setting 'undolevels' to 0 saves
> some memory. Running the maze macros on a big maze is guaranteed to run out
> of memory, because each change is remembered for undo. In this case set
> 'undolevels' to a negative number. This will switch off undo completely. In
> a future release extended memory will be used to avoid these problems.

Things to Do, Someday
------ -- --- -------

Clipboard conversion, Vim <-> Mac
Printing
New malloc() and free() that can use MultiFinder temporary memory when the real
    stuff gets low
Filename completion and globbing, support for :set path
Better Font and Size menus
Add an option to put the backup files in the Trash instead of in the
    folder which they're backing up

Things to Do, probably not for a very long time
------ -- --- -------- --- --- - ---- ---- ----

Shell escapes and filters
Either much more Mac-like or much more Unix-like file system model


What's the Icon Supposed To Be?
------ --- ---- -------- -- ---

It's supposed to look like an ADDS Viewpoint, the kind of terminals they
had for the Prime minicomputer at my high school.  On second thought,
though, the keyboard bears a remarkable resemblance to the old Timex-
Sinclair 1000 (I think it's the lack of a space bar in the picture that
does it), so maybe that had some sublimnal influence.