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Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

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Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#311

Post by cbushko »

PestoDiRucola wrote: post #59

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 think VSCode is a great piece of software until my it starts using most of my laptops resources and my fan kicks in.

- I do a lot of work in a terminal. VSCodes terminal support is pretty bad. It might be better when they get nicer terminal tab support (not what they recently added)

- vim + terminal is considerably lighter and faster

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#312

Post by iLemming »

coliveira wrote: post #310
iLemming wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> emacs lisp is not the best language in the world Emacs-lisp is a Lisp. It may not be the best of Lisps, but even a bad Lisp can be far more powerful than many other non-lispy languages. To understand what makes Emacs so awesome, one has to understand the philosophy of Lisp. Emacs Lisp is not just a text editor, IDE, email client, project management tool, scientific calculator, etc. Emacs, first and foremost is a Li…

Emacs lisp is not a bad language, but it's also not the reason for the existence of Emacs. It is the other way around: it was Emacs that created Emacs lisp. Initially, emacs was created on top of TECO, arguably the worst, most difficult programmable editor ever created. TECO language was so bad that they decided to switch. But emacs, the editor, was successful even running on top of a terrible language that nobody li…

> Emacs lisp is not a bad language, but it's also not the reason for the existence of Emacs

Early Emacs and the modern GNU/Emacs I think, are two distinct worlds.

I believe Lisp has shaped Emacs into its modern form. I just can't imagine the possibility of building something like Org-mode, with the same level of extensibility and flexibility in any other language that is not a Lisp.

I bet if you ask any serious Emacsen - authors and maintainers of Magit, CIDER, or any other serious Emacs package if they could replicate their work, for example, in Python. I have no doubts, they'd definitely say: "that's nearly impossible"

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#314

Post by Jenk »

bombela wrote: post #163
curriculum wrote: post #84

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 .…

Try the plugin easy motion. It changed my life.

+1 easy motion makes the default jump-by-search feel really clunky. Typically it is mapped to double-tap leader then object, and it will then highlight those objects with a short-code to jump right to it.

Examples:

\\w -> will highlight all words after \\b -> all words before \\e -> ends of words after \\ge -> ends of words before \\fe -> all occurences of the char 'e' after \\Fe -> 'e' before \\se -> 'e' in both directions \\j -> lines after \\k -> lines before etc.

but can even use it with traditional search:

\\n -> will highlight all search-matches found by a previous "/" or "?" search after current pos. \\N -> will highlight all search-matches before.

mega useful.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#315

Post by bombela »

addicted wrote: post #248
bombela wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, the reality is that WYSIWYG editing of all sorts is object oriented. You first select the object and then the action. So it’s not clear whether being more comfortable with selecting an object and then performing an action on it is innately easier for humans, or just what we’ve been conditioned to from using word processors, spreadsheets, or even GUI based file explorers. But if you look at command line usage, i…

I do woodworking and construction work. In real life, I always must select first. Apply action second. So to me this feels more natural.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#316

Post by bombela »

bashinator wrote: post #285
bombela wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have an almost entirely non-visual imagination and internal narrative. Vi and then vim were pretty easy to adopt, and it’s still easy for me to learn new editor-as-a-language functionality. I started using it in the 90s and only figured out the visual stuff in the past few years (for block editing).

That is maybe the key point here. I am the total opposite of you. A friend of mine is like you and he thrives in vim.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#317

Post by taf2 »

Maybe it’s MacOS or just working in generally larger files but for me vim seems to be lagging more recently… I think it might just my computer but I really find it annoying when typing on my local machine can sometimes lag as if I’m sshed into a remote machine… anyways still way faster editing in vim then not… neovim sounds neat and worth trying

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#318

Post by creatonez »

anaganisk wrote: post #36

I have an honest question, the real advantage of Vi is its installed everywhere, and just works over ssh. What is the benefit of a terminal IDE like neovim or vim with tens of something plugins? Vscode or other powerful IDEs do the work much better.

> the real advantage of [vim] is its installed everywhere, and just works over ssh.

I've always thought this is a very silly reason to use vim, when almost any text editor can remotely access files via ssh, and FUSE tools like sshfs exist.

I use vim extensively as both an IDE and config file editor, but almost never actually run it remotely on servers. I would rather not lose my configs and have to have two separate sets of muscle memory.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#319

Post by vladharbuz »

taf2 wrote: post #317

Maybe it’s MacOS or just working in generally larger files but for me vim seems to be lagging more recently… I think it might just my computer but I really find it annoying when typing on my local machine can sometimes lag as if I’m sshed into a remote machine… anyways still way faster editing in vim then not… neovim sounds neat and worth trying

I had this problem in iTerm. Switched to alacritty and it's buttery smooth. Might be worth trying.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#320

Post by iLemming »

necrotic_comp wrote: post #289
lacksconfidence wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the vim philosophy is slightly different. The vim philosophy is if it worked yesterday, it works today. This means, for the most part but not exclusively, not making breaking changes. This means, by proxy, that the defaults were set a long time ago and are unlikely to change. It's a difference in who they consider the most important users, the ones already using it or the new users that might use it in the fu…

Exactly. This lets configurations accrete over time and ultimately get to a place where you don't have to think about your changes and they "just work" for you. I think emacs is more likely to have breaking changes, but I haven't used it a terrible amount, so I can't really say.

> I think emacs is more likely to have breaking changes

Matter of fact - stuff in Emacs breaks all the time. Frankly, Emacs simply defies any logic - sometimes you feel it shouldn't work at all, yet it does.

You see, when talking about differences of configuring Emacs and any other text editor or IDE, one has to understand - there's really no "configuration" in common sense. Emacs is a Lisp environment where you run your programs. You can download, import, and use other programs. Very often those programs "talk" to each other. Sometimes (of course), the line of communication breaks, and then you have to step in and patch them up so they can continue working together.

That's the biggest headache and confusion for beginners. They shy away from learning Emacs Lisp, and they think they can focus on learning Emacs fundamentals by using some "minimal configuration".

But only after understanding the basics of Lisp - structural editing, evaluating s-expressions, macro-expansion, etc., one could appreciate the enormous capabilities of Emacs. And when something breaks, it's quite simple to spot the problem and put a workaround.

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