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vim-cocoa

What is vim-cocoa?

vim-cocoa is a Mac OS X native vim GUI implementation in Cocoa, it started as a Google Summer of Code 2007 project, it's now maintained by Jiang Jiang <gzjjgod@gmail.com>

Features

  • Single process (consider vim-cocoa vs. MacVim like Safari vs. Chrome)
  • Fast Core Text based renderer
  • Excellent CJK support

What's the differences between the original vim, MacVim and vim-cocoa?

The original vim (checkout from vim official Subversion repository) only provides a Classic/Carbon based GUI for Mac OS X users, it lacks some important features and does not give us the best GUI experiences.

Thus, both MacVim and vim-cocoa started to alleviate this problem by reimplement the whole Mac GUI with Cocoa, MacVim started earlier, in 2006, but the author (Björn Winkler) didn't announce it at that time. After it's matured enough to be announced, vim-cocoa is already accepted as a Google Summer of Code project and I (Jjgod Jiang) already started coding, although these two projects started with the same goal, there are a lot of differences in their design decisions, which made their code base not so possible to merge together.

In short, MacVim is a more feature-rich, more Mac-integrated version, while vim-cocoa follows a simpler, more lightweight and faster approach.

Nico Weber has a nice introduction on which MacVim does but vim-cocoa doesn't (I discussed a bit about my design goals for vim-cocoa too):

http://groups.google.com/group/vim_mac/browse_thread/thread/c16868aa7dcad59b

What's New?

See github for changelog.

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