Vim 7.4

After a successful beta, Vim 7.4 was released. The main feature of this release is a faster regular expression engine, but as Bram points out there are over a thousand fixes and small improvements.

If you want to upgrade, you can download it from the Vim download page. I upgraded my local version with Homebrew:

brew update
brew upgrade vim

The help page (:help version-7.4) has more details on the new regular expression engine:

The new engine uses a state machine. It tries all possible alternatives at the current character and stores the possible states of the pattern. This is a bit slower for simple patterns, but much faster for complex patterns and long text.

Most notably, syntax highlighting for Javascript and XML files with long lines is now working fine. Previously Vim could get stuck.

I’ve actually run into these XML issues myself when working on DocBook and similar formats, so I’ve been happy with the update so far…