Modern Vim

What’s Next for Vim 8

Vim’s pace of development has really picked up since the Neovim fork was created. Neovim was first to introduce features such as job control and a terminal emulator, but Vim 8 is catching up. It seems as though the competition has benefited both projects.

Adding :terminal support

In July 2017, Bram Moolenaar added patch 8.0.0693 to Vim introducing a basic implementation of a :terminal command. I’ll admit that it took me by surprise. Not least because Vim’s documentation (:help design-not) has long stated that:

Vim is not a shell or an Operating System. You will not be able to run a shell inside Vim or use it to control a debugger. This should work the other way around: Use Vim as a component from a shell or in an IDE. ...