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Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

crispgm.com

391–400 of 429 posts

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#391

NeoVIM seems like a big upgrade over a lot of editors. As a very casual Emacs user who never got excited enough for the "self-documenting and programmable editor" idea, VIM gets more appealing by the day for me. I am also using Spacemacs for a year or so and it's definitely better than normal Emacs. Haven't tried Doom Emacs and I doubt that I will, regardless of a lot of positive feedback. I mean, Emacs is alright bu…

> I am just not in the club of the people who'll use 25% of their workday chasing an Elisp error Yes, experienced Emacs users do write some emacs-lisp all the time. But despite the popular belief, it's not about chasing and fixing Elisp errors. I, for example, write emacs-lisp functions just because I can. Here are some typical examples: - I have a GitHub link to an issue or a pull-request, I want to download the des…

I am not here to shit on Emacs -- I recognize that I am not its audience. Took me a long time because I was in denial but eventually I figured it out.

But I get Elisp warnings and errors every day. And mind you, I did abandon my monstrous init file a year ago and just yielded to Spacemacs with very minimal changes like font, cursor customization et. al. -- basically just 7-8 of these. It has a ton of stuff in it though. Spacemacs isn't a lightweight Emacs. Being on macOS might be another thing, too, I don't know.

Even with that, there is trouble on a regular basis. I would think an all-in-one package deal would have better debugging and proper care but oh well. :(

Again, not here to degrade Emacs itself, I am only here to share that the amount of effort I am willing to invest to maintain my local installation is apparently not enough to have a well-running editor, and that I will be giving up on it because of that.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#392
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree with "powerful IDEs do the work much better". It's just not true. Neovim with a few plugins (less than 10 is certainly enough) can definitely compete with IDEs.

I've used emacs for about 10 years (written plugins, declared emacs.d bankruptcy, gone all-in on org-mode), so I'm familiar with the pros of configurable editors. Here's a list of more advanced functionality built into Intellij that would be difficult to replicate: - Bullet-proof navigation and advanced refactoring that works every time across a wide variety of languages. - Database integration: syntax highlighting f…

I mean, it's a trade-off. IntelliJ is better at some things, and worse at others. There are certain programming languages where I prefer IntelliJ (mainly Java and PHP), and there are other cases where I prefer Neovim (Rust, Julia, Python, LaTeX, markdown).

> Text-editors struggle with the "integrated" aspect of an IDE.

Neovim integrates a lot better with my terminal heavy workflows than IntelliJ does.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#393
post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In English, sure. Not in Hindi for example (मैं खाना खाता हूँ - 'I food eat') or in .. object-oriented methods of many programming languages. I don't think there's anything special about that mapping, whichever way around. I'm not inclined to think I'd perceive things or act any differently if my main way of describing things (English) had a different grammar - a rose would smell just as sweet. I can see some value,…

Some languages use both orders, and the difference is more of a stylistic choice.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#394

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 ;)

Don't worry, you're not alone. 100% of the people I've ever saw using Vim / Neovim spend much longer "calculating" their next command than they would spend just doing in with CMD-D in VSCode. It's frustrating to see. CMD-D in VSCode does 95% of what's needed, with no mental burden. But hey, you can't "brag" that you "know VIM" if you use VSCode...

> 100% of the people I've ever saw using Vim / Neovim spend much longer "calculating" their next command than they would spend just doing in with CMD-D in VSCode.

Right, there is mental overhead to calculate moves but often times you can extract out patterns into intuitive key mappings once you've solved the problem once.

For example, this is taken my vimrc:

    nnoremap  s* :let @/='\').'\>'cgn
    xnoremap  s* "sy:let @/=@scgn
The basic idea here is I can either move the cursor on top of a word or select some text, hit s*, type what I want to change that text to and then hit dot (.) as many times as I want to repeat the change to the next match. It's like being able to use multiple cursors except without needing multiple cursors and I also get to see the result applied once before I start applying it to multiple things. It's also possible to skip matches using existing Vim mappings (n).

I use the above all the time to make changes in spots where I would have used multiple cursors with VSCode.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#395
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they removed gvim (which is what I use in most cases). There is no comparable third party GUI like gvim available. They're all either abandoned, unstable or simply very different with lots of bling and gimmicks. I'm not sure I understand what you're missing from neovim-qt? https://github.com/equalsraf/neovim-qt I suppose maybe we have diffuse cases - but I'm fairly certain I'm running qt neovim, and not nvim in a t…

Thanks. I'd previously tried and failed a couple of times to get a NeoVim gui installed, mainly because I wanted to try one of those ligature fonts that display -> as → and the like. There seemed to be a few different options, in various states of being abandoned, or unpackaged, or needing libraries not in my OS, or ... Turns out now all that's needed for Ubuntu is sudo apt install neovim-qt. Thank you for prompting…

Does your language not support Unicode?

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#396
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, you're not alone. 100% of the people I've ever saw using Vim / Neovim spend much longer "calculating" their next command than they would spend just doing in with CMD-D in VSCode. It's frustrating to see. CMD-D in VSCode does 95% of what's needed, with no mental burden. But hey, you can't "brag" that you "know VIM" if you use VSCode...

> 100% of the people I've ever saw using Vim / Neovim spend much longer "calculating" their next command than they would spend just doing in with CMD-D in VSCode. Right, there is mental overhead to calculate moves but often times you can extract out patterns into intuitive key mappings once you've solved the problem once. For example, this is taken my vimrc: nnoremap s* :let @/='\ ').'\>' cgn xnoremap s* "sy:let @/=@…

Clever! I think I might steal these, or make something based on your idea.

Kind of wild: in taking apart your command, I learned three things about Vim that I didn’t know, each one of which is massively useful. And I use it every day!

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#397
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever you say words “natural”, or “friendly” you actually mean “what I am used to”. As the saying goes “Basically, the only ‘intuitive’ interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.” (Usenet discussion about Apple Macintosh). So, no, I spent couple of years struggling with non-modal editors, where I had that feeling all the time “I have no idea how to do it effectively in this $EDITOR, while I know five k…

Irrelevant nit, but: > “Basically, the only ‘intuitive’ interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.” The nipple is not intuitive for everyone. One of our children struggled mightily with the nipple and we had a miserable two or three months of breastpumping and finger-feeding before he finally figured it out.

Following-up on irrelevancy: what made you stick? We had the same experience, but gave up after 6 weeks because breastpumping was exhausting, and switched to bottles and artificial milk which our daughter loved immediately.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#398
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 100% of the people I've ever saw using Vim / Neovim spend much longer "calculating" their next command than they would spend just doing in with CMD-D in VSCode. Right, there is mental overhead to calculate moves but often times you can extract out patterns into intuitive key mappings once you've solved the problem once. For example, this is taken my vimrc: nnoremap s* :let @/='\ ').'\>' cgn xnoremap s* "sy:let @/=@…

Clever! I think I might steal these, or make something based on your idea. Kind of wild: in taking apart your command, I learned three things about Vim that I didn’t know, each one of which is massively useful. And I use it every day!

> I think I might steal these, or make something based on your idea.

Sure thing, if you can improve it let me know.

Here's an even wilder thing. I set those s* mappings up about 2 weeks after using Vim and I still don't know how they work in perfect detail but I was able to find them by Googling. There's definitely a stigma that you need to be some crazy wizard to use Vim but with a bit of repetitive learning and Google you can get pretty far.

Here's a link to my vimrc around a few mappings associated to finding / replacing and multi-cursor-like things: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/085c4ac827290bc7aeea...

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's a wonderful thing that the IT ecosystem has created such a variety of different tool methodologies converging on the same purpose. It seems analogous to convergent evolution in biology.

Re: Neovim 0.5 is overpowering

#400
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.

ah cool thanks i will give it a go...
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