Help wanted: netrw maintenance

[Bram Moolenaar]

Charles E Campbell has created the very useful netrw plugin and has been
maintaining it for a long time. Unfortunately, he has not had
sufficient time available and the current version included with Vim is
quite old. There is a newer version on
http://www.drchip.org/astronaut/vim/#NETRW but still hasn't been
sufficiently tested.

Charles also maintains a few other files and doing all of them together
clearly doesn't work. I think it would be good if someone can take over
maintenance of netrw, which is the biggest of the Vim plugins Charles
made. Note that I haven't been able to get an answer from Charles about
this, last I heard he was having trouble with his computer.

This is not about taking netrw in another direction or refactoring it,
lots of people (including myself) depend on the current mechanism,
variables to configure it, etc. It is about making sure bugs are fixed
and perhaps add a few minor features. I hope the latest version can be
tested and added to the Vim distribution.

--
Seen on the back of a biker's vest: If you can read this, my wife fell off.

/// Bram Moolenaar -- Br...@Moolenaar.net -- http://www.Moolenaar.net \\\
/// sponsor Vim, vote for features -- http://www.Vim.org/sponsor/ \\\
\\\ an exciting new programming language -- http://www.Zimbu.org ///
\\\ help me help AIDS victims -- http://ICCF-Holland.org ///

[Gianmaria Bajo]

Personally I made an updated version of the vim syntax file (also maintained by Charles E Campbell), based on his, but it's much faster, has less color clutter (especially regarding vim commands, the abbreviated forms are disabled by default), recognizes scopes, can better differentiate user functions from built-in ones, individual highlight groups for 'let', 'call', conditionals (if/else/endif, '?:'), loops (for, while), without sacrificing much (anything that I can see at least).

I don't know if somebody is interested in trying/testing it (I've been using it for a while already), the file is here:

https://gist.github.com/mg979/47b72ec3366ca482f85dbebe42caef6a

A couple of new options:

- g:vimsyn_no_abbreviated_commands

if declared and == 0, vim commands are highlighted also in their abbreviated forms; for a few commands, the abbreviated forms are recognized also without this option.

- g:vimsyn_specfile

Disabled by default because I don't know what it does and it is rather slow. Declare and set to 1 to enable.