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Neovim 0.8 Released

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Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I use VSCode since switching away from Neo/Vim because things just work. I don't have to install a bunch of plugins like I used to where I don't know what works and what doesn't work with each other. For example, for Rust, I go to VSCode extensions page, click install on rust-analyzer, and that's it. I don't have to set up an LSP, syntax highlighting, etc which are each their own plugin on Vim.

I just want to express why I sometimes prefer things that don't "just work". I love VSCode. I use (neo)vim just because I am used to them (started using them before VSCode was around).

Firstly, not "just work" means there will be no features to suddenly appear and "help" me. When I start to use a new IDE I never know what inserting "{" does: Will a "}" also appear? Will it start a new line? Will it cause indentation to change? Will it insert a whole snippet? How do I just insert a "{"? An IDE usually comes with lots of "helper" features like this, and questions like these add up. The result is that I never know what happens when I press a key and get agitated when the result isn't what I expect. If I set up everything myself this doesn't happen. (neo)vim is pretty bad in this sense actually. The default formatoptions and filetype indent plugins are pretty annoying, and the "J" normal mode command has behaviors that surprise users and cannot be turned off (you can remap it for sure), but by the time I met VSCode I got familiar enough with them already... I recall VSCode's default was pretty clean. IDEs are absolutely the worst.

Not "just work" also means that I know how to change something if it steps into my way, since I set up everything myself. If I have to edit a file with special formatting rules that I need to follow, I know where to change auto formatting rules. If I have to read some generated code or code from dependency libraries, I know where to turn off warnings from linting. Since rust-analyzer is set up by myself, if one day I find that its version or config is not compatible with this new project I am starting to work on, I know immediately how to change it. If my whole setting up effort is "clicking a button", it becomes harder for me to find where the change needs to be made. Such things are not just "if"s actually, but happen pretty often from my experience, often enough to make me think it's better to set up everything myself than to figure things out each time.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#162

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…

You're right. An environment that's all text and generally uses fixed width fonts is not at all the proper place to run an editor for dealing text that is best understood by displaying it with fixed width fonts.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#163

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…

One of the main features of NeoVim over VIM is that NeoVIM can be embedded into other programs and new GUIs can be built that use libvim. There are now programs you can download that do that, for example [1]. Certainly, this is still an experimental line of software and I don't use the NeoVIM GUIs and don't claim that this has been proven a success yet, but there are some encouraging signs. https://github.com/topics/…

I’ve used a few of the Neovim GUIs; they each have a different take on UI/UX for a Neovim GUI.

I’ve been using VimR the longest, which is a Mac-native GUI for Neovim: https://github.com/qvacua/vimr

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#164

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…

Average joe-schmoe Neovim user here. My goal is not to emulate VS Code and other similar software. I enjoy Neovim for programming mainly because...

- First and foremost, I love the text editing features Vim has (eg. the movements, modes, keys etc). It just feels great on my hands.

- It's minimal. Well, you are free to make it as minimal or as bloated as you would like to ;)

- For me, it sort of gamifies text editing. I don't claim that using Vim makes me x-times more efficient at programming than someone else, but I do enjoy the thrill of learning a new, quicker way to make some changes.

- Vim/Neovim offers me a seemingly endless amount of things to learn. Some may see this as a negative thing, but I see it as a feature. It's truly like a skill or a hobby. You can learn the basics and be perfectly fine, but you can also dive deep into more ways to improve. I love this.

- I love how configurable it is, and also that you can actually learn about how it works.

- Also if I'm being honest, I feel like a myself and a lot of other Neovim users are basically masochists to some extent.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#165
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your terminal application is an emulator of a decades old technology originally used in physical consoles, with layers upon layers of enhancements that add support for colors, cursor control, etc. At it's core, it's just a grid of characters. The GUI as a platform is quite literally a superset of the terminal, for example because the terminal emulator app is a GUI itself. Hacking the grid of characters to render line…

The new generation of terminals are nothing like what you’re describing: GPU acceleration, full color support, font shaping, support for ligatures, built-in support for multiplexing, SSH and more.

WezTerm [1] is probably the best example right now but there are others.

These aren’t your father’s terminals.

[1]: https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#166

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…

For a perspective that hasn't been shared all ready, I like modal editing because I A) don't like to use the mouse any more than I have to and B) have awful memory when it comes to complicated chords of keyboard shortcuts. Except for the bare basics (switching modes, jumping to the start and end of lines, etc), I heavily rely on much easier to remember names of commands to interact with my editor. Like toggling line…

> but that'll be much harder for me to remember than :set number

You could also do Ctrl+P on VSCode (or Ctrl+Shift+A on a Jetbrains IDE) and search for "line number". Command based interfaces are no longer unique to CLI tools.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#167
post #120
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No. Microsoft's general reputation for spying on its users renders "spyware" a reasonable shorthand for what it either does now, or perhaps is reasonably likely to do at some time in the future. I would fall back to the softer "telemetry" ONLY IF they were to provide some sort of genuinely reliable affirmation that it's not spying, which I don't think they could do today absent legal or other generally obvious incent…

Lots of big tech companies (including mine) let their devs run VSCode on company machines. If there was a concern about spyware, I feel like all of those security teams across the industry wouldn't have signed off on this, especially with billions of dollars of IP at stake.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#168

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…

[deleted]

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#169
post #149
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Microsoft's general reputation for spying on its users renders "spyware" a reasonable shorthand for what it either does now, or perhaps is reasonably likely to do at some time in the future. I would fall back to the softer "telemetry" ONLY IF they were to provide some sort of genuinely reliable affirmation that it's not spying, which I don't think they could do today absent legal or other generally obvious incent…

I mean, you can say whatever you want - you only diminish your own argument by doing so. It's like the boy who cried wolf - if you keep shouting "spyware" with no true evidence of spyware, then by the time that "spyware" actually is happening, no one is going to care. > what it either does now Spyware is defined (Google) as "a form of malware that hides on your device, monitors your activity, and steals sensitive inf…

Even the FTC struggles to define spyware. But I think you’re right that a disagreement on the definition is at the heart of all of this. I wouldn’t be so overconfident in asserting that spyware is defined in your particular way here, though. There isn’t exactly a consensus! VSCode is certainly not to be lumped in with password stealing keyloggers, but because they continue collecting telemetry data even after you explicitly disable it, VSCode does fall under the “collecting data without a user’s knowledge” category of spyware.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#170
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah telemetry - you mean software that sends back information about what I'm doing to some 3rd party? Unlike spyware which is software that sends back information about what I'm doing to some third party. Totally different, got it.

I said this to someone else, but spyware is defined (Google) as "a form of malware that hides on your device, monitors your activity, and steals sensitive information like bank details and passwords." Please furnish any example of Microsoft stealing sensitive information like bank details and passwords via VSCode.

I don't want MS to monitor me. Anything that enables them to track me better is sensitive because I don't want to be monitored.
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