Command-T 0.8b released

I’ve just released version 0.8b of the Command-T plug-in for VIM. This is a powerful, open source file-navigation plug-in inspired by the "Command-T" feature in TextMate.

Highlights

Long-term users may notice that this is the first release that I’ve ever labelled with "b" for "beta". The reason is that this release features a major overhaul of the scoring algorithm which is used to sort matches. I am very excited about this change because it makes the order in which results are returned much more intuitive, and has a noticeable impact on the usability of the plug-in.

Previously to get the most out of the plug-in you had to understand how the algorithm worked in order to get the best results. With these changes, it now seems almost as though the plug-in can "read your mind" and deduce what file you’re looking for. If people are interested, I can write a blog post going into more details about this.

But as I said, the overhaul was a major one, and the new algorithm still needs to be optimized to perform well on directories containing many (thousands) of files. That’s why the release is labelled as "beta" quality.

Additional details

A full change-log appears under HISTORY in the documentation.

In the announcements for the previous two releases, 0.6 and 0.7, I said that "the basic functionality is now solidly in place, and with a number of successful releases under its belt it seems that most issues with compatibility on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux are sorted out, so a 1.0 release is likely in the near future". With this release that road-map has changed a little and I plan to knock out at least a couple more point releases before declaring 1.0.

So, if you’re a VIM user check out the screencasts and give the plug-in a try. If you’d like to support development you can use the donations page to make a donation, or consider submitting a patch for the project.