Vifm

Somewhat incompatible changes

This release contains a number of changes which are technically non-backwards compatible. However, all of them should have very little negative impact (i.e., hard to notice the change without reading the changelog).

At the same time, a bug, fixing which is likely to have an impact on user configuration, has been identified but not yet fixed to give a chance to update all affected vifmrc files. If a bug is likely to be relied on by the configuration, a dialog with the explanation and instructions will appear.

Sorting and non-Latin characters

Until this release Vifm has always used byte sorting (effectively, sorting of UTF-8 byte sequences). From now on a form of Unicode normalization is applied to strings when sorting views and completion results. The change can be expanded to other cases in future releases. The measured performance impact is negligible (several percent).

Practically, this means that characters like "a" and "ä" are now grouped together regardless of the way in which diacritic is being encoded. Some characters can still appear in weird non-alphabetic positions because full Unicode normalization results in losing case sensitivity and is therefore not applied.

Addressing some longtime woes

For one reason or another some inconvenient peculiarities have accumulated over the years. Time has come to replace workarounds with something better:

• global variables (g:var) replace the use of environmental variables for internal purposes, thus avoiding polluting environment of child processes
• use of :let to invoke a builtin function discarding its result is superseded by a proper :call command
• use of execute 'normal! gl' to run selection now has :open command as a better alternative
• size of selection can now be queried via selected() (previous releases required expand('%c') == expand('%f') or an equivalent trick)
• %{expression} macro in 'statusline' can now have } embedded as \} (\\ still means two slashes)
• dialogs now recognize Enter and Escape keys as "yes" and "no" replies

More useful menus

:copen recalled last navigation menu for years, but that's not always enough. Now up to 25 such menus are stored after their use and can be navigated to via :chistory/:colder/:cnewer.

In addition, :grep or :find can be rerun on the same set of commands right from the menu which previously required leaving the menu just to get back to it.

History of command-line in menus is now also managed and stored, making staying in menu mode for longer a more pleasant experience.

UI improvements

Navigation between views/tabs via new :wingo command with optional incremental completion thanks to new 'wildinc' option (applicable to any other command or all of them at once).

Ability to highlight a view column (:highlight column:size ...), specify how highlighting applies ('hloptions'), set a separator between miller columns in set fillchars+=millersep:'|', shorten columns in the middle (^ in 'viewcolumn').

Also, displaying of CJK characters on Windows should have much fewer issues now.

Lua API

Slowly adding new functionality. This batch comes with things like primitive file operations, ability to create custom views or menus and handling ranges of :commands.

Other

Search matches can be traversed via Tab and Shift-Tab while in the prompt (applies to navigation mode as well).

An invalid expression in :if or :elseif no longer just skips that command, now all commands up to and including matching :endif are skipped to avoid executing half-random sequences of commands due to a mistake, which also results in better error messages. Previously, :elseif was also evaluating its expression even some earlier branch was already taken.

:rename now asks whether file move is intended instead of assuming a user mistake and refusing to proceed.

Support MTP devices by bundled vifm-media script if simple-mtpfs is installed. Also improve what devices are offered for mounting (e.g., don't offer a whole drive if it contains partitions).

Fixes

Get preview graphics out of the way in more cases (like when opening menus). Terminals with more than 32768 color pairs should not cause visual defects or crashes anymore.

Merging of directories was either not asking for confirmation or aborting after skipping a file. Paths with some unreadable characters were not processed due to a regression. Directories weren't counted in estimates of file operations.

&& operator was always evaluating both branches instead of properly short-circuiting. %a macro of 'statusline' was displaying wrong values on non-Linux Unix-like systems. :compare falsely claimed that files of identical size and with common prefix are identical.

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