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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

#42
post #18

> Bram admitted to using other editors on rare occasions, and said he always misses the dot (.) command, which repeats a change several times in different positions, and the ability to record and replay a sequence of commands. > “Just a simple ‘change this text into that text’ can be very laborious without a repeat command,” he said. “I haven’t seen another editor that provides this feature.” Note that emacs has had…

Have you used vim? . is much closer to running a keyboard macro than it is to C-x z - only you don't have to record anything ahead of time, nor necessarily even realise until afterwards that you might want to reuse what you've just done. There's no precise equivalent in emacs. It's described here: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Repeat_last_change

C-x z is lame by comparison. Like, suppose you just typed in M-d h e l l o, and you press C-x z. It repeats the last command: self-insert-command. So you get an additional o. Thanks, Emacs!

More comedy: after you move the cursor, perhaps planning to use C-x z to insert another o elsewhere in the document, C-x z now replays the last cursor movement command.

(None of this is illogical, it's simply that C-x z is not, probably, very useful for editing text.)

With vim, on the other hand, pressing . would replay the word deletion, followed by the insertion of "hello". And you can use other motion commands to move about the file before repeating it again, allowing you to perform this operation in multiple places.

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

#43
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.

Speaking solely as an outsider to the development of Vim, NeoVim, and Vim extensions - the only time I see references to NeoVim anymore is when someone else brings up regular Vim (and always includes the narrow-sighted rant of "vim is obsolete, neovim is the future").

Threads here imply that NeoVim has a lot more traction and capabilities than Vim, yet it might as well not exist for all that we don't hear about it.

> that'll be the end of old Vim

To be frank, no, it won't. Not so long as Vim is installed by default, and holds the name Vim. NeoVim can't even simply replace Vim as the default, since it works differently (the changed configuration path, for one), and no longer works on all of the platforms that operating systems are installed upon (even if intentionally).

Vim just works. Until that is no longer the case, NeoVim will have a hard time gaining traction outside of those who are already waving its flag.

That said, I appreciate NeoVim - if for nothing else - for prompting Bram to realize there are more usecases. But I would argue that its time has passed, as bright as that time was.

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

#45
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

neomake (async execution of tasks like compiling, linting and syntax checking) and deoplete (for async autocompletion).

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

#46
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.

I think that so long as the primary rhetoric from the NeoVim camp is "vim is dead, long live NeoVim", with a dash of disrespect for Bram and his goals of continued platform compatibility and coding style... I personally don't expect such acknowledgement.

Doing so might make Bram the 'better person', but I wouldn't blame him if it makes him a bit resentful.

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

#47
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…

There is a vim plugin for VS ;)

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

#48
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…

I've been using Emacs for years now but since I got introduced to PHPStorm I must say I won't ever use Emacs for PHP again. It's features are so addicting that I don't mind not having the shortcuts I'm used to.

I was never an IDE guy but PHPStorm is just too good, so much time saved.

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

#49
post #34

Anybody using a neovim MacOS app [1]? I'm a huge vim user, but mostly via MacVim [2]. [1] https://github.com/rogual/neovim-dot-app [2] https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim

Thanks for posting this, I was looking for something like that :).

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

#50
post #34

Anybody using a neovim MacOS app [1]? I'm a huge vim user, but mostly via MacVim [2]. [1] https://github.com/rogual/neovim-dot-app [2] https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim

Well, I've been using Vim on iTerm 2 for a long time and have been trying neovim recently, but everything through command line, since it fits better with tmux
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