MacVim Snapshot 153 released / maintenance

[Yee Cheng Chin]

Hi MacVim users, snapshot-153 has just been released! You can download it by going to https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/releases/latest

The last two releases of MacVim were focused on fixing outstanding issues and getting macOS 10.14 (Mojave) support to work properly, which was challenging due to the way some APIs were deprecated by Apple. If you were having issues with Mojave and MacVim flickering a lot, please download the latest release which should make it a lot more usable. There are still some minor outstanding issues on Mojave and you can see what they are by going here (https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%2210.14+Mojave%22). Feel free to file issues if you encounter any problems.

If you don't know who I am, my name is Yee Cheng Chin and I have been asked to take over as the new maintainer of the MacVim project a couple months ago, and I will be responsible for the development of MacVim from now on. Thanks @splhack and @jpetrie for the work they have done up till now in maintaining the project.


# Priorities

Moving forward, here are some priorities for MacVim:

* Bug fixing and stabilization. There have been bugs and platform incompatibility that have been creeping into MacVim for a while now, and each OS release usually made it worse. The next few releases will focus on looking through the existing bugs and try to smooth them out to make MacVim the seamless experience that it should be. Please do file bugs on Github (https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/issues) if you see a problem.

* Improved regression testing. MacVim currently supports a large range of OS versions (more on that later), with different user preference settings that affect which renderer to use, etc. It doesn't currently have any automatic testing outside of the core Vim unit tests, so what has happened quite a bit recently were regressions that introduced bugs in some configurations (e.g. non-native fullscreen, or 10.12 Sierra) but not others making it not immediately obvious during testing. The fix would be to implement some sort of unit tests and automatic testing to be able to quickly guard against regressions to hopefully catch at least the most obvious breakage.

* Improve documentation. Clean up the wiki, contribution guide, README, development guide, etc.

* Implement a new renderer as the old Core Text renderer is deprecated in Mojave and the fix for it using buffered draw introduced some (minor) scrolling performance regression. This is lower in priority because the current renderer works for now.

* Continue to integrate native Mac features to MacVim (e.g. TouchBar support).

I would like to maintain a regular cadence in releasing (~1-2 months) to keep MacVim up-to-date with latest Vim and to deliver fixes to users quicker. You should be able to use https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/milestones to check on the progress on the individual releases.


# COMPATBILITY

One particular issue I would like to bring up is that right now MacVim's official release supports back to 10.8 Lion, meaning we have to support 7 OS versions. The code also has miscellaneous support for pre-10.8 compatibility. This creates a lot of ongoing costs when we try to make MacVim work for newer versions of OS, leading to more and more spaghetti and fragmented logic. I would like to officially drop support for 10.7 or below, and eventually investigate dropping support for 10.8/10.9. If this is an issue for you, *please* voice it! It's not set in stone and likely won't happen immediately.


If you have comments feel free to use this mailing list or file issues on Github. If there's interest I could consider opening up a chatroom on Gitter but I prefer not to have too many places discussions could happen.

[Kelvin Lawrence]

Thanks for the updates and great to see all the plans for MacVim. MacVim has been an essential part of my daily workflow for more years than I can remember.

Cheers,
Kelvin