Vim 9.2.0943

Remember when Vim was just a vi clone that Bram Moolenaar wrote for his Amiga in 1991, because the original vi was nowhere to be found on that platform? Thirty-five years later, that "improved vi" is still shipping patches every single day, and the latest drop — patch 9.2.0943, tagged August 11, 2026 — keeps the streak alive.

The Long Arc to 9.2

What began as a personal portability project is now the editor that refuses to die, powering everything from quick server-side fixes to full IDE setups inside the terminal. Vim 9.0 arrived in June 2022 with the Vim9 script language, 9.1 followed in 2024 with a mountain of small fixes, and 9.2 landed on February 14, 2026 with the headline change the community had been waiting years for: a real GTK4 GUI, enabled at build time with --enable-gui=gtk4. Fullscreen mode in the GTK UI, popup transparency, an XDG-compatible xdg.vim script, and stable ConPTY support on Windows 11 rounded out the release.

Patch 9.2.0943: The GTK4 Stabilization Continues

Version 9.2.0943 is a patch-level release — Vim does not do big-bang updates, it does relentless incremental hardening — and the August 11, 2026 batch is almost entirely about polishing that new GTK4 front end:

• 9.2.0943 — hardcopy test fix: test_hardcopy failed on the GTK4 UI because it opened a dialog; the fix uses :hardcopy! to skip it and sets GDK_DEBUG=no-portals in the test environment (Foxe Chen).
• 9.2.0942 — winpos on GTK4: test_mksession_winpos() is now skipped on GTK4, since window position is not supported there.
• 9.2.0940 — scrollbar column loss: the GTK4 shell lost columns every time a window was split, shrinking the text area; the size-allocation logic was reworked so rows and columns are computed from the latest requested size.
• 9.2.0941 — clipboard tests: a new CheckClipboardInTerminal guard makes clipboard tests skip properly when the test terminal has no clipboard (Hirohito Higashi).
• 9.2.0939 — UTF-8 cell counting: fixed a wrong cell count for overlong UTF-8 byte sequences in mbyte handling.

Why It Matters

None of this is glamorous, and that is exactly the point. The trajectory from a single-file editor to a project that can absorb a ground-up GUI rewrite and then spend weeks just making its own test suite pass on it is the whole story of Vim in miniature: unglamorous, obsessive, and remarkably durable. Every one of these patches is also backported into the maintenance stream, so the fixes land for everyone, not just nightly users.

What's Next

Work on Vim 9.3 is already underway in the repository — the changelog hints at stricter modeline handling via 'modelinestrict', a rewritten :TOhtml, and new functions like ch_listen() and getbgcolor(). But if the last three decades are any guide, the patch train will keep rolling long before that milestone arrives. Update when you can — :help version9 will show you exactly where you stand.