Vim 8.0 Released With GTK3 Support, Async I/O & DirectX Support

Vi IMproved has been further improved with today's Vim 8.0 release. In fact, this is the first major release of Vim in the past decade!

Vim 8.0 adds support for asynchronous I/O, channels, and JSON. Vim 8.0 also supports jobs, timers, partials, lamdas, closures, packages, new style testing, and more. Additionally, Vim 8.0 adds support for the GTK+ 3 tool-kit and Microsoft Windows users even have DirectX support.

The DirectX support in Vim's context is focused on DirectWrite support for better text rendering. The async I/O and channels support is for exchanging messages with other processes in the background. JSON is the Vim approach for the message format of IPC communication. Vim 8's timers are asynchronous.

More details on Vim 8.0 via the release announcement while more detailed information on the Vim 8 improvements can be found via this documentation page.