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Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

crispgm.com

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Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you find your brain can actually work that way? My issue with all of these relative jump points, repeat this N times, etc of VIM is by the time I’ve calculated in my mind what the command should be I’d have already done it with just standard navigation/mark/yank/repeat. But perhaps you have galaxy brain ;)

The way vim works is actually the opposite of what your brain wants, this is one of the reasons why learning vim tricks is hard. The vim model is "action-object" (eg dw, delete word). A more natural, friendly and interactive model is the opposite, "object-action": first you select the text, your editor highlights the text, then you apply actions to the selection, one by one, and see what happens after each one. Becau…

You've oddly crystallized why Kakoune has so far failed to grab me!

The description you gave of the actions one takes in editing makes sense: in most non-modal editors, you select the text you want to take actions on, then choose the action to take. But, I can do that in literally every modeless editor! That's the way essentially all of them work.

But when people write of "Vim as a text editing language" as many comments here do, the action -> object model -- again, at least for me -- fits the pattern. We say "I'm going to the store," not "store I'm going to," unless Yoda we are. And, most programming languages that aren't purely object-oriented tend to follow a rough pattern of "action(parameter)". So in editors like Sublime Text (or VSCode or BBEdit or...) I tend to do editing in an entirely visual way, Vim approaches editing in a more language-based way, and when you describe edits in language, "[verb] the [noun]" is pretty natural.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No galaxy brain here ;) I generally don't use counts. If I want to go down a few lines, I don't count the number of lines and use 4j or whatever, I instead use / to search for the exact place I want to move to. This feels more natural and preserves the jump-list, so I can ctrl-o back to where I was. Same if I want to delete a few words. I don't count how many I want to delete and do 4daw, instead I do daw and press .…

Instead of counting, you can use :set relativenumber (vim/neovim builtin) to quickly see how far away lines are. (see https://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/vim-number/ )

In my opinion the real downside of using j and k to move isn't the counting part, it's the fact that k isn't a jump. That means it doesn't go into the jump list.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#153

I switched from vim to neovim because I thought I needed to to use coc.nvim - turns out I didn't need to, coc.nvim works in vim 8+ As a neovim user who is just having neovim load my vimrc - nothing neovim specific -, I don't see a huge difference. Are there features I am missing out on? I do like the idea of having everything in my vimrc so I could still use it with vim on a server if needed.

I reluctantly tried neovim at first. I didn't like it as much as vim at the time, mostly due to plugin compatibility and some bugs (this was a while ago).

I permanently moved to neovim because of the forward looking vision and community around it.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#154

I don't want to be flamed or start a debate about the values of one or the other, but why should someone in 2021 go through the hassle of setting up (neo)vim or any other terminal or barebones editor (looking at you emacs) when there's perfect solutions out there that work out of the box with a lot of features that neovim has. For example VSCode uses LSP "natively" and even has an excellent vi emulator you can instal…

I agree and that's why I use Emacs. It's perfect out of the box for me. I may not even use external packages if eglot gets merged in.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#156
post #18
post #15

I use nvim in the terminal and gvim/macvim on the desktop. I don't like how the nvim community seems to be throwing themselves wholeheartedly into lua and lua-only plugins (vimscript plugins are better because they work with both vim and neovim). Switching to init.lua also means losing all compatibility with vim, and I cannot fathom why people would want to do that considering that there is nothing that init.vim cann…

The thing is, Vimscript sucks. Using a more mainstream language would be great for a modern advanced editor. Vim has a ton of Vimscript plugins but I wonder how long it will take the Neovim community to replicate most of their functionality in Lua. I'd guess that not that long.

There is a point when it doesn't make any difference if the language sucks or not. What matters is if it is capable. You can say the same about most successful languages: C sucks, shell script sucks, eLisp sucks, LaTeX sucks, but they're all there and will continue to be because they have been capable of support the communities for which they were designed.

Now, you can freely dream about the perfect extension language for UNIX, or vi, or TeX, or emacs, but it won't make any difference because nobody will move from something that works to an unproven extension language just because some people (usually the minority) feel that it is a more comfortable language for them.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way vim works is actually the opposite of what your brain wants, this is one of the reasons why learning vim tricks is hard. The vim model is "action-object" (eg dw, delete word). A more natural, friendly and interactive model is the opposite, "object-action": first you select the text, your editor highlights the text, then you apply actions to the selection, one by one, and see what happens after each one. Becau…

You've oddly crystallized why Kakoune has so far failed to grab me! The description you gave of the actions one takes in editing makes sense: in most non-modal editors, you select the text you want to take actions on, then choose the action to take. But, I can do that in literally every modeless editor! That's the way essentially all of them work. But when people write of "Vim as a text editing language" as many comm…

I tend to pick and measure a piece of wood before turning my saw and cutting.

I say that I am cutting the wood. But I select it first before marking it and cutting it.

I noticed that I use the visual mode of vim a lot. With easy motion to highlight words or other object boundaries to quickly jump to.

I tried kakoune and liked it. But after 15y of (neo)vim it's hard to change. That plus how good You completeMe is for vim.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#159
Watching ThePrimeagen and tjdevries has also given me some good insights into neovim. Tjdevries has put a lot of work nvim-treesiter, and it shows. I have stuck with regular vim for a while because I have everything configured the way I want, but I am setting up a new build now, and I will probably move to neovim.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can make a hotkey to launch any editor, but not every editor is as "pathologically configurable" as vim. The combination of vim being terminal-based, highly-configurable, and lightweight makes it nice to use in a variety of contexts.

Its not lightweight.

It is, compared to pretty much any currently in-use editor.
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