Show HN: CuteVim – Portable Vim with a cute vimrc

That's not true. For many people Emacs' text editor is the least interesting part of it and use evil mode to get Vim-like bindings. While the jokes may lean on the differences in key-bindings, they are hardly the whole story. Vim is a super lightweight editor that is available everywhere and very easy to carry around your own single-file config. You're allowed to configure it however you want. Vim too has its share of annoying key chords... is one I use often enough that I stilllll haven't made a mapping for (and likely never will at this point).

> TBH I never really tried neovim, maybe because I like the start screen of vim? The idea of doing something for orphans may be cheezy, but I really like the message!

Ha, I like that! Personally I hide the home screen but I can get behind that and have donated to Vim before.

> Also why did you attempt to switch to neovim? I don't feel any limitation in vim. I'd be curious to know why you tried.

The first time years ago, was the try out the async stuff, then Vim got it so I switched back. The second time was very recently. I'm primarily a web developer and write a lot of Elixir. The Elixir community is rallied around NeoVim so the experience is quite a bit better. The maintainer of elixir.vim doesn't even write Elixir anymore (though he is very attentive to PRs and issues). I've contributed a bit to it, but ultimately I don't spend a lot of time hacking on Vim anymore (though I do have a todo item to update my vim plugins to make use of viml 9). At the same token, there is a bit of sunk cost fallacy going on in that I know VimL very well. I don't like the idea of having my config in two different languages nor do I like the idea of having to port my whole vimc config (which I know quite intimately) over to Lua. And ya, as you said, I feel no limitation in Vim other than the previously mentioned lack-of-Elixir support.

Oh ya, I was also convinced to try it out thanks to this talk [0]. Though, even as a quiet person myself, I found his speaking style very hard to take (but I powered through).

I'm actually aware of your Sixel project but never ended up trying it out. I've actually been following you on github for quite some time but---being primarily a web dev---often when I have to compile C on my mac I think "meh, I'll look into this later" and, of course, rarely come back to it. Not a very good reason, I know.

And ya, I kind of just switched to zsh years ago because it was "the thing to do". I do write enough shell scripts and never use any zsh-specific features, so I've been thinking of moving back to bash just to try it out again.

Thanks so much for your answer!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt-vmPC_-Ho

zsh isn't much less retro than bash is! They're, like, a year and a half apart; bash just has a special case of the GNU.

(It's wild to me that despite *gestures wildly*, zsh's release tarball is under half the size of bash's, though...)

>> Light text on a dark background blooms more and makes it harder to distinguish the characters.

> I asked my optometrist about the best setting for viewing comfort, and she said black letters on white background

I did some reading before I started using light themes, and the theory agrees with your optometrist, especially for astigmatism.

However, after getting an OLED screen, my experience didn't match the theory anymore: I could make the dark theme more comfortable with basic settings.

So I went back to check the research and I noticed it was not correctly controlling for ambient illumination and for the screen brightness.

I call that the 3 deltas:

- the 1st delta is between ambient brightness and the screen background color,

- the 2nd delta is between the screen background and the foreground color,

- the 3rd delta is between the ambient screen brightness and the screen foreground color.

In a dark room (at night), if you use a dark theme with a pitchblack background (as possible on an OLED screen) with a foreground of white text, it will NOT be comfortable if you leave the full brightness (usually 400 to 600 nits)

However, an OLED screen gives you precise control over the brightness: reduce it and you'll see it's possible to make the characters easier to distinguish on a dark theme than on a light theme.

I have scripts to do color inversion and different correction filters. I even have a shortcut for each, to reduce friction and try different settings for different conditions: I can go from a dark theme to a light theme in about 200ms, so I just go "click click click" on the keyboard until I find what conditions "clicks" with me :)

Unless I'm sitting in a very well light place (that I consider too bright for my preferences), I'm more often with the dark theme.

I'd encourage you to take into consideration the 3 deltas and try by yourself a dark theme while doing brightness control +- color filters, or at least to check the research (ask GPT!) your optometrist recommendation is based on.

The point of vim is to be vi but with more features.

It's not to configure it however you dang well please.

If this were the point, which it isn't, you could use emacs, which can be configured in vastly more dang ways. Including ways which are a superset of vi, as you yourself admit.