v4.4.0-rc1 (beta1)

[pit-ray]

Minor

New

• Add the following word-motion which behave almost exactly like Vim. ([Feature] Implement E and e emulation. #57, Add emulation of word motion in Vim(e.g. w, b, e) #75)

  ID	Feature	Emulation
  move_fwd_word	words forward for normal mode.	w
  move_fwd_word_simple	words forward for visual mode.	w
  move_bck_word	words backward for normal mode.	b
  move_bck_word_simple	words backward for visual mode.	b
  move_fwd_bigword	WORDS forward.	W
  move_bck_bigword	WORDS backward.	B
  move_end_word	Forward to the end of words.	e
  move_end_bigword	Forward to the end of WORDS.	E
  move_bckend_word	Backward to the end of words.	ge
  move_bckend_bigword	Backward to the end of WORDS.	gE

  These functions do not work in visual mode except for w and b, because they copy the text once and retrieve the text via the clipboard. iskeyword option is fixed to the default value of Vim in Windows and cannot change it currently.
  There is an option charbreak to set the criteria for considering a Unicode character as a single character.

  ID	Type	Default	Note
  charbreak	str	grapheme	Mode for how to split a single Unicode character. The grapheme mode treats a combination character as a single character. The codepoint mode processes the combination character for each codepoint.

Note

• If you want to use word motion (e.g. w, B, e) in MS Office Word, it is recommended to disable Use smart paragraph selection.

  

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This discussion was created from the release v4.4.0-rc1.

[pit-ray]

This is not an official 4.4.0 release, but please give us feedback for impressions or feelings.

[gilbh]

Hi,

I tried to install 4.4.0rc, and have two questions:

1. could it be that the version is still shown as 4.3.3? That is what I am getting in the About window, which is confusing to me.
2. what is the difference between setup_win-vind_4.4.0-rc1_64bit.exe and win-vind_4.4.0-rc1_64bit_installer.zip?

Thanks,
Gil

[pit-ray]

1. The version is a forget to update. It is not an official release, so please forgive me.
2. When we download a file with an .exe extension in Windows, receive multiple warnings in general browsers, such as Edge, Chorome, Firefox. Therefore, I wrapped .exe file with zip. To avoid warnings with the .exe extension, we must pay $xx per year and issue a code signing certificate. However, this will be difficult because there is no profit and no sponser in win-vind.

Thanks.

[gilbh]

I don't think there is any reason to spend money for seamless .exe, but maybe you should consider removing the .exe., because to me at least it was confusing, and, as I understand from what you are writing, there's nothing good about it (compared with .zip)

[pit-ray]

I didn't mention it above, but the .exe is used in the installation of winget. And, it is exactly the same thing as the wrapped one with zip, so there should be no problem if you accidentally download it.

[gilbh]

1. The version is a forget to update. It is not an official release, so please forgive me.

Just to clarify: in itself it is not a big deal, it is just that I need to be able to discern between 4.3 and 4.4 when I am testing stuff. If it is not complicated, I think it is worth to trouble to update the version in 4.4 b/c easier to figure out which version I am working with. Thanks!!

[pit-ray]

Thanks for letting me know about every little thing.
To update the display version, only rewrite CMakeLists.txt. However, I will do in beta2.

[gilbh]

From what I am seeing right now, caret move is very slow to respond. Each w operation takes time, I can literally see the selection of the sentence goes on and then off, before the caret jumps forward. When I switch back to an older version of win-vind (4.2.1), the caret moves fast again, as it should.

This is not particular to MS Word, it happened also in a regular Notepad.

[pit-ray]

The newly implemented word-motion captures text through the global clipboard like ~ command and parses the text for movement. The moving behavior is the same as Vim because it uses the same algorithm for text parsing.
As you say, its performance is not good. However, I could not implement the e command without parsing.

In only the w and b commands, the same function as before are available with move_fwd_word_simple, move_bck_word_simple.

Example
Using light behavior w and b instead.

ennoremap w move_fwd_word_simple
ennoremap b move_bck_word_simple

Thanks.

[gilbh]

Thanks. When I added the two lines to the .vindrc, the movement of b and w improved. But this got me thinking: why not routing them by default to move_bck_word_simple and move_fwd_word_simple? What is good in their slowness? (In contrast, I understand that e cannot be faster...).

Best
Gil

[pit-ray]

In terms of guaranteeing that it works exactly the same as the original Vim, I did so to unify the e, gE, etc.

But as you say, I would consider making w and b exceptions to the default.

[gilbh]

I see. I suggest checking all other actions, such as W and B, that do not require global clipboard (I think?), to try and minimize action time.

I am also wondering if there are any optimizations or other workarounds that you think could improve performance. It is really slow now (but works well!).

Just a thought. I get it that the limitations here are from the system and not your code.

Thanks for everything.

Best, Gil

[pit-ray]

WORD-motion, such as gE, W or B, needs text parsing as well. However the fast version could not be implemented because Windows does not provide white-space based word motion.

If there is a way to get the text around the caret without global clipboard (e.g. UI Automation, machine learning based character recognition), they could be faster. And the waiting time for the clipboard could be optimized a bit more.

It is still a beta version, so I will consider more.

Thanks

[gilbh]

Fantastic!