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Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

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Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#31

Post by owaislone »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #12
owaislone wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neovim is Vim for me and many other users. Vim is irrelevant to me now. The community is rallying behind Neovim and it shows great potential. It just needs to be bundled by major distros so it can be installed on servers with 1 command and that'll be the end of old Vim. Bram has done a tremendous job with Vim but it's time to move on to the Vim of the future.

I've never touched neovim as I'm perfectly happy with vim - what reasons are there for me to consider making the switch? I would guess neovim isn't even on the radar of most vim users. I don't see neovim surpassing vim any time soon, personally.

> what reasons are there for me to consider making the switch?

There are numerous improvements and features but I'll not talk about them. It has the momentum. Hundreds of developers are contributing to it. That should be the biggest reason to switch as it directly means Neovim will be much healthier than Vim which lacks the momentum.

If you want to know more about what exactly Neovim is doing on the technical side, I suggest you read up the 7 newsletters [0] since the inception of Neovim.

[0] https://neovim.io/news/

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#32

Post by TeMPOraL »

greyman wrote: post #22

I don't know if I am too old or just think differently than vim enthusiasts, but I somehow couldn't bring myself to like vim. Of course that's might be since I can't find motivation to dig into it further. As a developer I use it almost daily when doing something on the server, like editing some config etc., but I somehow always prefer a software, where you do things intuitively without needing to first learn a short…

> but I somehow always prefer a software, where you do things intuitively without needing to first learn a shortcut for everything.

As the quote goes, "The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned."

The word you're looking for is "different". Vim (and Emacs) have different shortcuts than what you're used to from Windows. That's because they're much older. Vi and Emacs actually predate those "intuitive" shortcuts of yours.

And like with many things our industry standardized on these days, just because it's popular, doesn't mean it's not utter shit.

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#33

Post by owaislone »

fs111 wrote: post #19
owaislone wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neovim is Vim for me and many other users. Vim is irrelevant to me now. The community is rallying behind Neovim and it shows great potential. It just needs to be bundled by major distros so it can be installed on servers with 1 command and that'll be the end of old Vim. Bram has done a tremendous job with Vim but it's time to move on to the Vim of the future.

You must be living in a bubble tbh. I am using vim for 12+ years now and it is perfectly fine.

Vim is fine but Neovim is better and judging from the community involvement, will keep getting better at a much faster rate than Vim.

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#35

Post by hxegon »

vbezhenar wrote: post #10
owaislone wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neovim is Vim for me and many other users. Vim is irrelevant to me now. The community is rallying behind Neovim and it shows great potential. It just needs to be bundled by major distros so it can be installed on servers with 1 command and that'll be the end of old Vim. Bram has done a tremendous job with Vim but it's time to move on to the Vim of the future.

Why would it be the end of old vim? I've never used neovim and I don't plan to use it, vim is perfectly fine for me, as it is. I guess, most of vim users don't even know of neovim. Sure, it's good to have a choice.

A lot of other comments make related points that kind of dance around this, but here it is: The major improvements of neovim aren't (directly) user facing. It's a major refactor, which makes it immensely easier to maintain and contribute too. Neovim isn't a vim reinvention, it's a vim renewal.

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#36

Post by criddell »

libria wrote: post #17
mcjiggerlog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never touched neovim as I'm perfectly happy with vim - what reasons are there for me to consider making the switch? I would guess neovim isn't even on the radar of most vim users. I don't see neovim surpassing vim any time soon, personally.

Neovim's popularity is more with extension developers. My understanding is that it enables them to develop features rivaling those in IDEs. Vim users won't switch for Neovim itself, but they might if extension writers only target Neovim. I think Neovim also has a pluggable engine, so IDE vim emulators can simply include that portion rather than implementing the functionality per platform.

Can you name a couple of extensions that somebody considering Neovim should look at?

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#37

Post by throwawa88127 »

owaislone wrote: post #7
akkartik wrote: post #3

Has Bram Moolenaar ever publicly acknowledged the influence of Neovim on Vim 8? At the very least, Neovim provided the market research to show that async was worth doing.

Neovim is Vim for me and many other users. Vim is irrelevant to me now. The community is rallying behind Neovim and it shows great potential. It just needs to be bundled by major distros so it can be installed on servers with 1 command and that'll be the end of old Vim. Bram has done a tremendous job with Vim but it's time to move on to the Vim of the future.

I didn't get the memo. This sounds like typical millenial propaganda from a couple of fanboys trying to wrestle control of some software from the original authors.

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#38

Post by mbel »

owaislone wrote: post #31
mcjiggerlog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never touched neovim as I'm perfectly happy with vim - what reasons are there for me to consider making the switch? I would guess neovim isn't even on the radar of most vim users. I don't see neovim surpassing vim any time soon, personally.

> what reasons are there for me to consider making the switch? There are numerous improvements and features but I'll not talk about them. It has the momentum. Hundreds of developers are contributing to it. That should be the biggest reason to switch as it directly means Neovim will be much healthier than Vim which lacks the momentum. If you want to know more about what exactly Neovim is doing on the technical side, I…

Features might be a compelling reason to switch. The fact that something is furiously developed by hundreds of developers is a very poor reason. What does this rather meaningless "health" of Neovim gives to the end users? Fresh new bugs?

I'm not arguing that there are no good reasons to try Neovim. I just don't see any logic in your argument. You speak about loosely defined "health" and "momentum" as if there was a clear link between software quality and amount of buzz around the project.

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#39

Post by hxegon »

greyman wrote: post #22

I don't know if I am too old or just think differently than vim enthusiasts, but I somehow couldn't bring myself to like vim. Of course that's might be since I can't find motivation to dig into it further. As a developer I use it almost daily when doing something on the server, like editing some config etc., but I somehow always prefer a software, where you do things intuitively without needing to first learn a short…

First off, there's a lot of good reasons to use V.S. OK, Now that that's out of the way...

The one thing I see people cite the most when they talk about not learning vim is "shortcuts". Vim's main editing interface is not "shortcuts". It's an editing language. There's a huge difference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdC2ysrP-XA

(not trying to flame or boast or anything, just trying to honestly communicate my feelings here, but) Anytime I use an editor that doesn't have a similar model, it feels like trying to carve wood with a coffee mug. If that simile sounds weird and doesn't make sense, that's how it feels.

The second argument I hear is plugin/ide functionality. You can get syntax highlighting, linting, VCS integration, anything from the shell, C-Tags, plugins, in vim but a lot of the refactor type IDE stuff isn't up to snuff. I have a theory about this. In a regular IDE, refactoring manually is a pain point. This means the auto-refactor tools are more polished in IDEs. I do as many refactors that could be automated as any other programmer, but its not a pain point because manually refactoring in vim takes only marginally more thought/input than automatically refactoring in an IDE.

Not saying that IDE refactoring isn't better (it is), but it isn't a big enough productivity improvement for me to fix that versus, say, refining my vim mappings, or practicing using the git plugin vs always using CLI git, or finally integrating the tmux plugin, etc.

Now... THAT said. The onboarding process for vim is pretty awful. You either start with an austere text editor and piece by piece build it into an amazing IDE/text editor, or you start with a premade blackbox config that you are unequiped to tweak.

Re: Bram Moolenaar Discusses Developing Vim, How He Uses It, and Version 8

#40

Post by Sphax »

owaislone wrote: post #7
akkartik wrote: post #3

Has Bram Moolenaar ever publicly acknowledged the influence of Neovim on Vim 8? At the very least, Neovim provided the market research to show that async was worth doing.

Neovim is Vim for me and many other users. Vim is irrelevant to me now. The community is rallying behind Neovim and it shows great potential. It just needs to be bundled by major distros so it can be installed on servers with 1 command and that'll be the end of old Vim. Bram has done a tremendous job with Vim but it's time to move on to the Vim of the future.

From a Windows user point of view neovim is strictly than vim 8 / gvim 8.
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