Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

hostingadvice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 123 posts

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

#91

Post by philix001 »

falcolas wrote: post #66
hxegon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? I've seen tarruda and co. explicitly express gratitude and thanks to Bram.

By critiquing his reluctance to accept patches because he'll be stuck maintaining that code? By forking Vim and removing some compatibility and legacy support features when tarruda's multithreading patch was not accepted? No, the core contributors have not been outright in their criticisms, but IMO the fork itself shows a lack of respect for Bran's work and a lack of willingness to work with him to make Vim better. A…

People are free to fork open source projects. tarruda tried to merge the async job system before forking vim. Bram has the right to deny the patches, but the most successful projects are the ones that attract good contributors and don't depend on the output of a single coder. It's easy to say "just make vim better" without really trying to understand Vim's C codebase.

vim's source code is really hard to test. Refactoring is needed to make code testable. That's true for every project that doesn't have tests yet. Another thing that makes it really hard to contribute to vim is that it supports operating systems that don't even exist anymore. I really don't feel like spinning a VM to make sure my changes don't break it on MS-DOS. I would rather send a PR that removes MS-DOS support than support that.

https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/635/files

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

#92

Post by ajamesm »

falcolas wrote: post #43
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.

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. >…

Vim never needed async, it Just Wo ESC j j j j jjj ESC rks(TM):q :wq

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

#93

Post by philix001 »

andylei wrote: post #81
owaislone wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? It's not like Neovim (or any open source project) is an open house where anyone can come, throw some code over the wall and get it merged. Like any big project (Vim included), it is being maintained by a set of core responsible d…

> The more momentum a project has, the more contributions it gets that's not disputed. the question is, what specific impacts do these contributions have on me, the user? why should i, a user of vim, switch to neovim?

async plugins? true color support? If you have a 32-bit color capable terminal you can use any colorscheme and get real RGB colors.

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

#94

Post by soperj »

falcolas wrote: post #66
hxegon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? I've seen tarruda and co. explicitly express gratitude and thanks to Bram.

By critiquing his reluctance to accept patches because he'll be stuck maintaining that code? By forking Vim and removing some compatibility and legacy support features when tarruda's multithreading patch was not accepted? No, the core contributors have not been outright in their criticisms, but IMO the fork itself shows a lack of respect for Bran's work and a lack of willingness to work with him to make Vim better. A…

Since Neovim started up, Vim has seen the most commits in a year ever. Competition makes things improve.

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

#95

Post by soperj »

hxegon wrote: post #39
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 feelin…

Pretty sure that's not a simile.

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

#96

Post by eligundry »

ismailk wrote: post #67
cygned wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That got me: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/FAQ#how-can-i-change-t... It feels faster to me, but I haven't compared to vim 8. I don't use any plugins doing work in the background, so that's not the difference here.

you can do that in vim as well http://pastebin.com/LLm0tx88

TBF that is non standard behavior and won't work everywhere.

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

#97

Post by anoother »

falcolas wrote: post #43
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.

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. >…

> 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

Something about this comment (perhaps the above quote) makes me think that perhaps neovim will be to vim, what vim is to vi...

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

#98

Post by elliotec »

falcolas wrote: post #43
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.

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. >…

Neovim is objectively better in numerous ways. I don't need to list them here because a Google search should suffice.

It should be said that people who use Neovim often use the word Vim to keep it understandable and not seem annoying.

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

#99

Post by philix001 »

soperj wrote: post #94
falcolas wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By critiquing his reluctance to accept patches because he'll be stuck maintaining that code? By forking Vim and removing some compatibility and legacy support features when tarruda's multithreading patch was not accepted? No, the core contributors have not been outright in their criticisms, but IMO the fork itself shows a lack of respect for Bran's work and a lack of willingness to work with him to make Vim better. A…

Since Neovim started up, Vim has seen the most commits in a year ever. Competition makes things improve.

And some neovim patches are merged upstream.

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

#100

Post by tokipin »

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…

I'd argue Vim is actually the intuitive choice because its commands allow motion/editing across boundaries that make sense, without (in my opinion) awkward mouse/cursor motions. For example % at a function call will edit/select the whole call if the cursor is at the beginning of the function name.

Once you have the muscle memory, you use little thought on how to mechanically accomplish editing tasks, so the intent-to-accomplishment pathway is quite direct. In the end though this may not be the case for you, even if you earnestly dove into it.

I think the main difficulty with learning Vim is that its commands are like minimal "combinators" attached to arbitrary keys, and they take exploration/use to experientially bubble up these combinators to reach "comfort parity" with standard editors. In this way Vim is like the Lisp of editors.

About the ugliness, I agree. That's why I usually use a GUI version if I can. Plus it must be reiterated that Vim is more just a text editor, not an IDE like Visual Studio. If I could use VS+VsVim for everything, I would.

Post reply on HN