Subject: VIM v.6 after v.5
From: "Fergus on Linux" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Fergus" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 08:58:11 +0100

This may be pursuing a topic when more than enough has already been said: I
too seemed recently to "lose" a lot of utility from VIM v.6. Notably (i)
lost syntax-sensitive colours and (ii) (worse) unexpected and not easily
understood behaviour when entering, and when in, <insert> mode.

I've got 2 machines and don't mind wiping/ re-installing Cygwin on either or
both. Over the weekend I did this A LOT of times in order to try to
understand what on earth what was going on. I first thought it was all
linked to the ncurses, libncurses5, libncurses6 stuff. I also read traffic
on .vimrc and vimrc (no dot). During some of the re-installation experiments
I started with vim5 and then upgraded to vim6 rather than starting with
vim6. No better. On another occasion starting with vim5 and upgrading to
vim6 I noticed that vim 5 was NOT UNINSTALLED* and then everything worked
fine: colours, prompts, modes, backspacing, whatever.

* By this I mean, the executable vim.exe has been overwritten from vim5 to
vim6, but, for instance, the directory /usr/share/vim/vim58/ has survived
and /usr/share/vim/vim60/ exists. Also the file /usr/share/vim/vimrc has
survived from the vim5 installation. I wonder, is _this_ the file that is
somehow missing from a bare vim6 install? (Cf. Corinna's mention of
$HOME/.vimrc, which is a file I have never possessed either for vim5 or
vim6.)

The associated question arises: when vim6 is installed over vim5, why is
vim5 sometimes uninstalled and (as it appears in this case) sometimes not?
Hard to tell. It sounds daft, and probably is, but when clicking on the
little symbol in setup.exe to rotate through the possibilities going from
vim5 -> vim6 (keep; uninstall; installv6) it seems to me that if I do a
complete rotation ending up back at the default installv6, then the
installation of vim6 is achieved without first uninstalling v5. Whereas, if
I just select the default _without_ rotating through all other choices, vim5
is uninstalled prior to the vim6 installation. Crazy or what, and as I say
it's probably me and this despatch is of no help to anybody. But I have done
my best to report things as accurately a possible, in case it's of any help
to a fellow user who has lost utility or to the builders of vim..6..bz2 or
of setup.exe.

Fergus

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