Vim-history

This repository contains the old source code of Vim. It basically consists of two parts:

• Source Commits from the old CVS repository at the sourceforge project page
  This contains the history for the releases 5.5 to 6.4 and have been created by using git cvsimport (see documentation).

• Commits for the even older releases from releases 1.14 until 5.5
  Those commits have been created from the tarballs at the Vim FTP site:

  • http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/old/
    (v1.14 - v2.8, v4.0 - v4.5)
  • http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unix/
    (v3.0, v4.6, v5.0 - v5.5)
  • http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/extra/
    (v5.0 - v5.5)

  Those older commits are not the TRUE history. (E.g. commit dates are faked. They are based on the dates from src/version.c or src/version.h.)

Initially those two parts were two separate repositories. However they have been merged into a single repository using

git replace --graft 686757e4d2a46c8ab55c08c7a0ccd v5.5
git filter-branch v5.5..HEAD

Some tags were updated manually.

Release History

The following table summarizes the previous release dates according to several sources.

Data has been taken from the

• Vim FAQ
• a youtube video of Brams presentation on Vim (1:37)
• Wikipedia article on Vim
• Announcements in the mailinglist vim-announce(Note: Yahoo decided to shut down the Yahoo Groups archive on December 15th, 2020. But, the list may still contain (now some) invalid deep-links, that are not available in other archives :( )
• Announcements in the comp.editors news group
• Date of the release tags in the CVS repository (now available in the vim-ancient repository)
• Date of the release tag in the current Vim repository
• Source code (the date written in src/version.h or src/version.c) E.g.

  $ git show v8.1.0000:src/version.h | grep '#define VIM_VERSION_LONG\>'
  $ git show v4.6:src/version.c | grep '\*longVersion'
  

Version	vim-faq	video	Wikipedia	Announcements, comp.editors	Tags current, Tags old	Source code
9.1	2nd January, 2024		Jan 02	Jan 02	Jan 02	Jan 02
9.0	28th June, 2022		Jun 28	Jun 28	Jun 28	Jun 28
8.2	12th December, 2019		Dec 13	Dec 12	Dec 12	Dec 12
8.1	17th May, 2018		May 18	May 17	May 17	May 17
8.0	12th September, 2016	Sep 12	Sep 12	Sep 12	Sep 12	Sep 12
7.4	10th August, 2013		Aug 10	Aug 10	Aug 10	Aug 10
7.3	15th August, 2010		Aug 15	Aug 15	Aug 15	Aug 15
7.2	9th August, 2008		Aug 9	Aug 9	Aug 9	Aug 9
7.1	12th May, 2007		May 12	May 12	May 12	May 12
7.0	8th May, 2006	May 8	May 7	May 8	May 7	May 7
6.4	15th October, 2005		Oct 15	Oct 15	Oct 15	Oct 15
6.3	8th June 2004		June 7	June 8	June 8	June 7
6.2	1st June 2003		June 1	June 1	June 2	Jun 1
6.1	24th March 2002		Mar 24	Mar 24	Mar 25	Mar 24
6.0	27th September, 2001	Sep 27	Sep 26	Sep 27	Sep 27	Sep 26
5.8	31st May, 2001		May 31	May 31	June 5	May 31
5.7	24th June, 2000		June 24	June 24	June 24	Jun 24
5.6	16th January, 2000		Jan 16	Jan 16	Jan 17	Jan 16
5.5	21st September, 1999		Sep 19	Sep 21		Sep 19
5.4	26th July, 1999		July 25	July 26		Jul 25
5.3	31st August, 1998		Aug 31	Aug 31		Aug 30
5.2	24th August, 1998		Apr 27 [1]	Aug 24		Aug 23
5.1	7th April, 1998		Apr 6	Apr 7		Apr 7
5.0	19th February, 1998	Feb 28	Feb 19	Feb 19		Feb 19
4.6	13th March, 1997			Mar 13		Mar 13
4.5	17th October, 1996			Oct 17		Oct 12
4.2	5th July, 1996			Jun 21		June 17
4.0	21st May, 1996	May 29	May 29			May 29
3.0	16th August, 1994	Aug 12	Aug 12	Sep 7 [2]		Aug 12
2.0	21st December, 1993	Dec 21	Dec 14	Dec 31 [2]		Dec 14
1.27	23rd April, 1993	Apr 23				April 6
1.24						5 Jan 1993
1.17	21st April, 1992
1.14	2nd November, 1991	Nov 2

[1]: I think it is an error in the wikipedia page and very unlikely, that Vim 5.2 was released just 20 days after 5.1
[2]: Announced by Darren Hiebert

Merge the whole history

If you want to see the whole history of Vim in your one local repository, try this:

git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git
cd vim
git remote add vim-history https://github.com/vim/vim-history.git
git fetch vim-history --tags
git replace --graft v7.0001 vim-6-3-004

This virtually connects the tag v7.0001 on top of the tag vim-6-3-004. The development of Vim 7.0 was branched from around Vim 6.3.

Other repositories

• vim-ancient
  This includes the history from v5.5 to v6.4.
  This was converted from the old CVS repository at sourceforge.

• official repository
  This includes the history from v7.0 to the latest release.