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Neovim 0.8 Released

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Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#101
post #61

A text editor without a well rounded GUI story isn't worth it for me. There are all these desperate projects each with their own focus, ranging from "simple graphics acceleration" to "tons of bells and whistles, animations and ad-hoc UI extensions". UI should be thought out at PRs and issues, but the same people who develop the main core. But they don't have to, because they're making a terminal application, which ha…

The terminal is superior. You are just not skilled enough or advanced enough in thought to imagine what an interface can truly be.

A real terminal or a fake one drawn ontop of a gui emulating deacades old cruft?

Complete madness and inefficiency.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#102

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

> If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code

Just about 30 years of muscle memory for ed, then vi, eventually vim, and recently neovim. Also because one flavour or another is pretty much guaranteed to be available on any server I log into - as a contractor, it's handy to know there's a (to me) usable editor wherever I end up.

> I've spent months tweaking Neovim/Emacs configs in the past

I had a brief spell of Emacs madness at uni but then recovered and I've had pretty much the same vimrc since picking up vim modulo adding things like go-vim and surround in the last few years.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#103

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

Helix has segfaulted within minutes every time I've tried it. Despite being written in rust. It might be better now, but they've already lost me.

I switched away from VSC because I grew frustrated with the constant lag and terrible loading times.

The modern native stuff is either MacOS only or a proprietary newcomer, leaving me with no trust that I can stick with it long term.

And I'm a Nix user, so neovim doesn't randomly break for me, all versions are pinned. And if stuff does break when I chose to update my pinned versions it's trivial to rollback.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#104

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

Kinda just like the modal editing of vim and the features and improvements upon it by neovim.

These days I've been using the LunarVim suite of neovim enhancements and I like it quite a bit.

https://www.lunarvim.org/

95% of my coding workflow takes place in the terminal (along with tmux and iTerm2) and neovim fits very nicely there.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#105

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

vi (and in different ways, emacs) were designed for optimal editing productivity on low-bandwidth connections and low horsepower machines.

This created an imperative around efficiency per keystroke that, somewhat shockingly, remains the most thorough and successful mainstream attempt to get the most from every keystroke.

With modern technology and decades more experience it seems inevitable that someone could do better today (though even with those benefits not everyone is Bill Joy), but I’m not aware of anyone who has successfully attempted to beat vi/emacs for the “will learn arbitrarily hard tools to be fast” crowd, which necessarily counts the “my RSI is so bad I need my money’s worth out of every key press” crowd, and several other big blocks of badass hackers.

People still use these tools because they still have the highest ceilings on the effort/power scalability curve. That doesn’t make them right for everyone, but it makes them right for a lot of people.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#106

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

> If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? VS Code is a proprietary, spyware-riddled, resource-wasting worked example of why "modern" software sucks. Also for my personal use, everything that's not vim suffers from being not vim; it would cost me effort to switch for no cl…

> VS Code is a proprietary, spyware-riddled, resource-wasting worked example of why "modern" software sucks.

Perspectives like these (and others in the thread) remind me that there exists a separate cohort of engineers from people like myself which have absolutely polar opposite views. I respect your opinions, though I couldn't disagree more with them! :)

Well, except the bit about VSCode having "spyware". That's not true, and it weakens your point. It does have telemetry - I suspect that's what you mean, and you should just call it that instead.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#107

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

I use emacs. I have little desire to customize configs and spend hardly any time on it. Checking now, I haven't modified it since June, which means I haven't even installed any new packages (the equivalent of VSCode extensions) since then either.

Maybe I should spend more time on it, but my settings work for me and I can't really be bothered/find coding projects much more alluring than editing a config.

Why emacs, then? Mostly that I like the keybindings more than anything else. Emacs extensions in vs code are a poor imitation at best. I'm not really into modal editing either. Maybe I'd just have to spend the time to learn that, but I'm quite productive with emacs, so I don't see the incentive. I have keyboards with thumb clusters, so it's comfortable and quick to press key combinations in parallel. Switching between modes and executing key presses is inherently serial in comparison. I assume with practice I could get very quick at that as well -- after all, typing is also serial, but can still be fast. I just don't see any value proposition to switching.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#108

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

> If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code Just about 30 years of muscle memory for ed, then vi, eventually vim, and recently neovim. Also because one flavour or another is pretty much guaranteed to be available on any server I log into - as a contractor, it's handy to know there's a (to me) usable editor wherever I end up. > I've spent months tweaking Neovim/Emacs configs in the past I had a br…

> pretty much guaranteed to be available on any server I log into

So is nano, the original comment hits the mark, why exactly can't you use a proper code editor via ssh? There's very little reason these days. Haven't used a terminal editor for a decade despite doing tons of work that many would instinctively reach for the same job.

VSCode and pretty much every other equivalent has modal editing if that's the sticking point here.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#109

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

I use Neovim exclusively for the past 4 years or so. Before that I used WebStorm + sometimes Vim for another 6 years or so. To this day I'm thankful to my colleague and mentor, who introduced me to the basics of Vim (you know, how to quit it and all that) saying "it get's pretty handy when you need to edit something on the server"; that was probably around 14 years ago.

WebStorm was great, it was really magical how it just knows how this or that code relates to another piece of code, navigating around was a bliss. Where is that variable defined? Jump to definition, and you're there. You want to know what's that function does, even if it's somewhere in third-party libraries? No problem, jump to definition. The fuzzy-finder for everything (literally. From file names to methods to editor's commands and variables) was also amazing.

At some point though I got a bit annoyed with the fact that it took 5 seconds to start it up (multiply that by amount of different projects you need to open), and it's general resource hungry-ness. So I started experimenting with Neovim 0.3 (at the time), and pretty quickly managed to get near-webstorm experience with gutentags, fzf and amazing vim-fugitive for all the git things I did in the command line. And with resent native lsp & treesitter, it doesn't

I tried VSCode once, which was a fiasco -- for some reason it failed jumping to definition in a basic react project with typescript. Oh well.

Helix looks really cool, I'm playing around the idea of using it more, though I still will have to keep (Neo)vim around for vim-fugitive. Slightly concerned with how much muscle-memory re-training will needed though, then again it didn't took me too much to get to the same level of ease of use with Doom Emacs. Speaking of which, it worked flawlessly (and has even better git tool), but still was terribly slow at times, so in the end got too annoying to work with.

So in the end it boils down to Neovim being fast, not getting in the way, and habit, I guess.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#110

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

I was not familiar with Helix or Zed, so I took a look at the links. Both webpages prominently state that the editors are written in Rust. This reduces my interest in both projects. As a user, I do not care what language my editor is implemented in. Maybe I want a fast editor, or maybe I want a feature-rich editor. The closest I would come to caring about this is if I want an extensible editor - can I extend these ed…

For me the thing is if is written in rust it has more chances to get more contributors, besides all the rust benefits (fast, performant as if it were written in C, but without the worries of the memory issues).

Also just because I use rust, I could contribute, for C/C++ editors I will not be able, maybe I'll also give a chance if the editor were written in Go, but no other language, all the others are slow.

Also rust IMHO has a few apps (including commands) that are worth checking:

- Helix - Alacritty - Wezterm - Nushell - Zoxide - Starship

Then are others to replace grep, and other commands that I cannot remember from the top of my head.

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