Patches are welcome in whatever form. Discussions about patches happen on the vim-dev maillist. If you create a pull request on GitHub it will be forwarded to the vim-dev maillist. You can also send your patch there directly. In that case an attachment with a unified diff format is preferred. Information about the maillist can be found on the Vim website.
A pull request has the advantage that it will trigger the Continuous Integration tests, you will be warned of problems (you can ignore the coverage warning, it's noisy).
Please consider adding a test. All new functionality should be tested and bug fixes should be tested for regressions: the test should fail before the fix and pass after the fix. Look through recent patches for examples and find help with ":help testing". The tests are located under "src/testdir".
Contributions will be distributed with Vim under the Vim license. Providing a change to be included implies that you agree with this and your contribution does not cause us trouble with trademarks or patents. There is no CLA to sign.
We use GitHub issues, but that is not a requirement. Writing to the Vim maillist is also fine.
Please use the GitHub issues only for actual issues. If you are not 100% sure that your problem is a Vim issue, please first discuss this on the Vim user maillist. Try reproducing the problem without any of your plugins or settings:
vim --clean
If you report an issue, please describe exactly how to reproduce it. For example, don't say "insert some text" but say what you did exactly: "ahere is some text<Esc>". Ideally, the steps you list can be used to write a test to verify the problem is fixed.
Feel free to report even the smallest problem, also typos in the documentation.
You can find known issues in the todo file: ":help todo". Or open the todo file on GitHub to see the latest version.
The latest version of these files can be obtained from the repository. They are usually not updated with numbered patches.
If you find a problem with one of these files or have a suggestion for improvement, please first try to contact the maintainer directly. Look in the header of the file for the name and email address.
The maintainer will take care of issues and send updates to Bram for distribution with Vim.
If the maintainer does not respond, contact the vim-dev maillist.
Translating messages and runtime files is very much appreciated! These things can be translated:
- Messages in Vim, see src/po/README.txt Also used for the desktop icons.
- Menus, see runtime/lang/README.txt
- Vim tutor, see runtime/tutor/README.txt
- Manual pages, see runtime/doc/*.1 for examples
- Installer, see nsis/lang/*.nsi for examples
The help files can be translated and made available separately. See https://www.vim.org/translations.php for examples.