This repository contains the old source code of Vim. It basically consists of two parts:

• Source Commits from the old CVS repository at the sourceforge project page
  This contains the history for the releases 5.5 to 6.4 and have been created by using git cvsimport (see documentation).

• Commits for the even older releases from releases 1.14 until 5.5
  Those commits have been created from the tarballs at the Vim FTP site:

  • http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/old/
    (v1.14 - v2.8, v4.0 - v4.5)
  • http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unix/
    (v3.0, v4.6, v5.0 - v5.5)
  • http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/extra/
    (v5.0 - v5.5)

  Those older commits are not the TRUE history. (E.g. commit dates are faked. They are based on the dates from src/version.c or src/version.h.)

Initially those two parts were two separate repositories. However they have been merged into a single repository using

git replace --graft 686757e4d2a46c8ab55c08c7a0ccd v5.5
git filter-branch v5.5..HEAD

Some tags were updated manually.

The following table summarizes the previous release dates according to several sources.

Data has been taken from the

• Vim FAQ
• a youtube video of Brams presentation on Vim (1:37)
• Wikipedia article on Vim
• Announcements in the mailinglist vim-announce(Note: Yahoo decided to shut down the Yahoo Groups archive on December 15th, 2020. But, the list may still contain (now some) invalid deep-links, that are not available in other archives :( )
• Announcements in the comp.editors news group
• Date of the release tags in the CVS repository (now available in the vim-ancient repository)
• Date of the release tag in the current Vim repository
• Source code (the date written in src/version.h or src/version.c) E.g.

  $ git show v8.1.0000:src/version.h | grep '#define VIM_VERSION_LONG\>'
  $ git show v4.6:src/version.c | grep '\*longVersion'
  

[1]: I think it is an error in the wikipedia page and very unlikely, that Vim 5.2 was released just 20 days after 5.1
[2]: Announced by Darren Hiebert

If you want to see the whole history of Vim in your one local repository, try this:

git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git
cd vim
git remote add vim-history https://github.com/vim/vim-history.git
git fetch vim-history --tags
git replace --graft v7.0001 vim-6-3-004

This virtually connects the tag v7.0001 on top of the tag vim-6-3-004. The development of Vim 7.0 was branched from around Vim 6.3.

• vim-ancient
  This includes the history from v5.5 to v6.4.
  This was converted from the old CVS repository at sourceforge.

• official repository
  This includes the history from v7.0 to the latest release.