[Update - this has been superseded by 1.0.1 after the official release - head over to http://www.viemu.com for the latest version and all the details]

After quite a few months of development, quite a few weeks of testing, and quite a few features and fixes, ViEmu for Word and Outlook is almost ready for release. Beta 6 is the official Release Candidate 1 and it's ready for download:

  http://www.viemu.com/ViEmuW-0.99.6.msi

It's a free 30-day trial. I plan to prepare the web pages in the next few days, fix any remaining important bugs, bump up the version to 1.0, and announce it properly then. All feedback is welcome.

A few important release notes:

* Compatibility
It supports Word and Outlook 2002, 2003 and 2007. Support for Office 2000 or even 97 is a possibility I plan to investigate, depending on the demand.

* Core emulation
It's based on the same vi/vim emulation core as ViEmu for Visual Studio and SQL Server, although the integration is notoriously different.

* Word integration
vi/vim lines (:1, :1,2d, etc...) are maped to Word paragraphs. Since most editing in Word/Outlook is done with heavily wrapped-around paragraphs, the regular vim j/k/gj/gk vim model doesn't cut it - thus, there is a setting (on by default) that automatically exchanges the meaning of j/k/0/$ with that of gj/gk/g0/g$. It makes it more natural, but it can be turned off in the settings dialog in any case. gj/gk in tables will move to the next/previous cell (as they're internally sequential paragraphs).

* Large files
It can be somewhat slow for some operations in very large files.

* Yanking/pasting
The "system" register ("*) uses Word's copy/paste mechanism, obtaining formatted text yank and paste (this can be turned off with a user setting). Named registers ("a..."z) use a built-in raw text mechanism, losing format.

Let me know about anything that comes up. I have plans for further improvements in future versions (a :send command in Outlook, \b \i and \u operators for formatting, etc...) but, unless there is some important bug that needs fixing, the above download is what 1.0 is going to be.

Regards,

  Jon