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History and effective use of Vim (2019)

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Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#13
post #9

If Vim was a GUI application (and could smoothly handle long lines), it would the perfect editor for me. Alas, the best I've seen so far is Neovim's discontinued GUI frontends.

Why not GVim?

It's just a terminal really, still a TUI. I would like Vim to be able to e.g. draw a normal line instead of changing the background of a column of characters, when cc is set. Also not needing to patch fonts to get things like powerline. That and other things of this nature.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#14
post #10
post #9

If Vim was a GUI application (and could smoothly handle long lines), it would the perfect editor for me. Alas, the best I've seen so far is Neovim's discontinued GUI frontends.

Not sure I understood your point. There are GUI versions for Windows/Linux/Mac/etc: https://www.vim.org/download.php I use GVim (without the menu/tool bars).

It's still a TUI. I would like Vim to be able to e.g. draw a normal line instead of changing the background of a column of characters, when cc is set. Also not needing to patch fonts to get things like powerline. That and other things of this nature.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#15
post #9

If Vim was a GUI application (and could smoothly handle long lines), it would the perfect editor for me. Alas, the best I've seen so far is Neovim's discontinued GUI frontends.

What's wrong with the way it handles long lines? It can either wrap or not wrap depending on your configuration. Personally, I disable wrapping in every editor I use because I find it extremely off putting. I'm curious which behavior you desire and if you have any examples of editors that you think handle long lines well.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#16
post #9

If Vim was a GUI application (and could smoothly handle long lines), it would the perfect editor for me. Alas, the best I've seen so far is Neovim's discontinued GUI frontends.

Which discontinued Neovim GUI do you mean? As far as I know, while there are lots of discontinued ones, there are also several actives ones, see [1]. The "Activity" column in the linked table doesn't always show the correct age, e.g. vimr [2] is at least three years old.

[1] https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects#gui [2] https://github.com/qvacua/vimr

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#17
post #6

I love vim. I am not one of those users who has a huge number of plugins and takes part in an extended eco-system that they perhaps do not fully understand -- for the last ~20 years of my life I have been trying to learn a little more vim each time I use it. I often don't, but it just has so many surprises that when I feel frustrated, I try to work out the "vimmish" way of doing things. Occasionally I give into tempt…

Am a similarly profiled (neo)vim user .. but without cat. Sometimes I catch strange letter combinations like "gqip" in my emails that baffle the recipients. Want vim keys everywhere!

This is me all the time. The worst is “kkk”. I can’t remember why I type it in vim (it’s muscle memory, and I’m not at a computer to try it out), but it has really bad connotations here in the US south, so… no bueno.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#18
post #9

If Vim was a GUI application (and could smoothly handle long lines), it would the perfect editor for me. Alas, the best I've seen so far is Neovim's discontinued GUI frontends.

Neovim is teen-cool, but seemingly gui was not their priority at all for years. Unless you’re trying to configure vim as vscode for some reason, don’t bother yourself and use gvim on linux/windows or macvim (mvim) on mac.

Or maybe I’m missing something here too, what “gui” means for you?

Edit: oh I see from other comments. No, this type of gui vim doesn’t do.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#19
post #15
post #9

If Vim was a GUI application (and could smoothly handle long lines), it would the perfect editor for me. Alas, the best I've seen so far is Neovim's discontinued GUI frontends.

What's wrong with the way it handles long lines? It can either wrap or not wrap depending on your configuration. Personally, I disable wrapping in every editor I use because I find it extremely off putting. I'm curious which behavior you desire and if you have any examples of editors that you think handle long lines well.

Performance. I mean really long lines, not merely lines which exceed window width. Vim is a bit better at that than Emacs, but it still slows to a crawl on some large lines. Sublime Text e.g. never has any problems with long lines on the other hand, no matter how long.

Re: History and effective use of Vim (2019)

#20
Extra kudos for mentioning on which Fish Disk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish) the first published version of vim could be found. I still have fond memories of poring over a list of Fish Disks and ordering those that sounded interesting by mail order. Those were the days...
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