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Neovim 0.8 Released

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Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#171

Post by modernerd »

ar_lan wrote: post #119
modernerd wrote: post #48

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…

> why you chose it over VS Code VS Code has always felt clunky to me. It always felt like a halfway house between the speed and simplicity of Vim and the maximalism offered by JetBrains IDEs. I also just generally don’t love GUI apps for code because I desire to be right in my shell. NeoVim offers LSP, Tree Sitter, DAP, and easy extensibility to reach full parity with any IDE, but with the benefit of it being: * Fast…

Thanks, some helpful insights here. (It sounds like the summary is, “set it up and don't fiddle with it too much.”)

I agree that the neovim community is great and neovim is of course very hackable, although there's always room to improve: an API for terminal UI would help a lot when writing neovim plugins and make everything feel more consistent, for example.

> I don’t know what process you took, but properly learning the tool from the ground up and minimally adding useful plugins as you go should not take much time at all.

I built a neovim config from scratch, used built-in docs, community support, and well-known extensions when needed. I wrote small Lua plugins when I couldn't find extensions or workflows that worked for me. And I had fun doing it!

I got something good in a weekend, something very decent in a week or two, but still had a lot of gaps between what I had and what I wanted (session save, restore and quick switching; a Magit-like staging and forge management UI for GitHub CLI -driven PR management; invoking and managing long-running terminal processes from the editor; find/replace in large numbers of files across big projects with something more intuitive than a quickfix list; linting with something lighter-weight and easier to configure alongside LSP servers than ale; quicklists for LSP issues; a simple test runner with quicklist for errors; I can go on…).

After trying out extensions for some of those things but finding nothing that fit the bill, I played with Emacs and had a pretty similar experience there (weeks of work just to reach parity with VSC+a few extensions). I concluded I was wasting my time — it was pretty clear I was after an IDE more than a text editor at this point. VS Code seemed a nice in-between option. There are things I miss from vim/Emacs (speed, keyboard-driven workflow, getting to enjoy and celebrate editors with a community of likeminded weirdos), which is why I tend to get sucked in by these update announcements and discussions. But for the most part VSC is fine.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#172

Post by [deleted] »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #152
johnfn wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Well, yes, of course Google would say that. If you ask DuckDuckGo to define spyware, it offers these: > Software that secretly gathers…

[deleted]

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#173

Post by sophacles »

kweingar wrote: post #167
jrm4 wrote: 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…

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.

Like log4j!

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#174

Post by seti0Cha »

johnfn wrote: post #149
jrm4 wrote: 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…

I have a tangental concern, which is that all things microsoft these days seem to be evolving towards an advertising platform or a subscription. The way they keep adding integrations into their other stuff is understandable, and doubtless convenient for many people, but I can't help but think that someday after they are deeply embedded in the workflows of large swaths of the development community a message will appear in your editor suggesting an upgrade to the pro version of some tool or plugin and the freemium experience will have arrived.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#175

Post by modernerd »

denvaar wrote: post #164
modernerd wrote: post #48

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.…

Agree that it gamifies text editing – vim motions are fun, even though I largely don't miss them in VS Code, or I use a vim extension when I do.

> …myself and a lot of other Neovim users are basically masochists to some extent.

It's great of you to say this, and heartwarming to see a sense of self-awareness on HN.

It's easy to rationalise our tech choices away (vim = speed, efficiency, freedom!). It's harder to admit that we may have chosen our tools simply because it's fun to walk a learning curve that runs sharply from pain to joy. Of course we could pick an easier tool! But then our path runs from apathy to apathy! And we'd be making it alongside people who think tools are just tools, instead of within a counterculture of likeminded people who think that tools are _everything_.

Maybe I should give neovim another shot…

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#176

Post by kweingar »

sophacles wrote: post #173
kweingar wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like log4j!

I think there's a bit of a difference between a bug that went undiscovered for years and vetting third-party software to see if its telemetry compromises your employees or IP.

I mean, sure, if you want to avoid log4j from happening, you can write all of your software from the ground up in-house with no third party dependencies (or audit every line of code for every third-party program you do use), but I don't see how that's relevant to a discussion about whether VSCode is compromised to a degree that other editors aren't.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#177

Post by psalminen »

I use vscode and neovim. Both have their benefits.

Neovim is my main driver for reviewing/editing code. I have a few plugins and many personal functions/key bindings.

Vscode is great for quick copy/paste text and their plugin ecosystem. Ie working with azure has been a dream with vscode.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#178

Post by sophacles »

kweingar wrote: post #176
sophacles wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like log4j!

I think there's a bit of a difference between a bug that went undiscovered for years and vetting third-party software to see if its telemetry compromises your employees or IP. I mean, sure, if you want to avoid log4j from happening, you can write all of your software from the ground up in-house with no third party dependencies (or audit every line of code for every third-party program you do use), but I don't see how…

The point was that people thought "Oh surely log4j was vetted by the big companies that depend on it - I mean it must be OK if AcmeCorp uses it!". (or openssl, or sendmail, or ...). That's not too different from "Oh look at all these big tech companies using it, they must have vetted the telemetry".

Maybe a little extra caution is warranted.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#179

Post by cool_hw »

Beltalowda wrote: post #86
cool_hw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Treesitter integration is a bit easier in neovim IMHO (but I haven't tried to make it work with vim too much.) Newer plugin development seems to be much more on the nvim side than vim as well. (Although I do feel fzf is superior to telescope, at least out of the box.) I'm happy neovim exists, it rekindled vim development. Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the bus factor 1 on vim?

> Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the bus factor 1 on vim? There's a bunch of people who are "members" of the vim organisation on GitHub. I don't know if they have full admin privileges or just commit/issue access. I never really understood why this has to be a problem in the first place: can always clone the repo and continue working on it if Bram disappears.

-------

    vim/vim is licensed under the Vim License

    There are no restrictions on using or distributing an unmodified copy of the software. Parts of the software may also be distributed, but the license text must always be included. For modified versions a few restrictions apply. The license is GPL compatible, you may compile the software with GPL libraries and distribute it.
-------

Source, if anyone wants to dig deeper: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/vim-license.txt

Unsure why I'm being downvoted but okay.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#180

Post by alwillis »

modernerd wrote: post #48

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

Every time I try VS Code, I get frustrated within 10 minutes and close it.

It’s a resource hog and the UI is kinda all over the place. The Vim plugin isn’t bad, but it only goes so far with the basic motions. It’s fine for basic editing but when you need to go deeper, it can’t go there.

I haven’t tried embedding Neovim yet, but that seems to be kinda of a hack. Besides I already have Neovim, so why would I embed it into a lesser editor?

But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with VS Code/Helix/Zed

I already have a Vim configuration I’ve been using for many years, so it was no big deal using it with Neovim.

I would also push back on the so-called fragility. I’ve been using Neovim for a 2-3 years and it hasn’t crashed once and I’ve done a lot of experimenting. In fact, I’m pretty impressed how well the many different plugins all work together. For example, I use the Tokyo Night colorscheme and it supports a bunch of the standard and 3rd party plugins by default:

* TreeSitter * LSP Diagnostics * LSP Trouble * LSP Saga * Git Signs * Git Gutter * Telescope * NvimTree * WhichKey * Indent Blankline * Dashboard * BufferLine * Lualine * Lightline * Neogit * vim-sneak * Fern * Barbar * Scrollbar * Mini

In a way, it’s not new—lots of old-school Vim plugins I’ve used also work great with the rest of the plugin ecosystem.

Vim was designed from the start to be part of a rich development environment. An IDE typically is a monolithic application; Vim and Neovim are designed to work as the centerpiece of a system of applications used by developers where they can use the best in class utilities as extensions to Neovim.

Vim works with linters, compilers, extensions, command line utilities and has done so for decades--and that was before Treesitter, LSPs and being able to be embedded.

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