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Neovim

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91–100 of 372 posts

Re: Neovim

#91
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should not be the top comment, it is a rant that misses the point. Neovim maintains backward compatibility where it makes sense to do so. Neovim is NOT a rewrite, it is a thoughtful refactoring that aims to achieve one of Vim's _original_ goals: first class support for embedding. And better interoperability.

I think you miss the point of my rant :P I'm not saying everything should be rewritten (though I do believe everything in C should be rewritten in C's successor which doesn't exist yet), but I'm saying Vim has gone too far in maintaining backwards compatibility, and if it would have improved interoperability, even at the expense of some backwards compatibility.

>I do believe everything in C should be rewritten in C's successor which doesn't exist yet

Both golang and D have a reasonable claim to being C's successor. People often think of D being a nextgen C++, but to me it has much more the feel of a C with garbage collection and batteries included.

And golang definitely feels like a modern C, at least to me. And that's what Rob Pike had in mind, as well.

PS: Had to use Word every day for years for my job. I despise it, and love vim. Vim keyboard navigation would have made my life so much easier when working on Word, and saved me several severe episodes of carpal tunnel. Luckily, I no longer have to use Word.

Re: Neovim

#92

I'm a hardcore Vim user and I just don't see the point of this. Not only that, but Vim is charity ware and requires the license to be included. The license is most notably absent from the Neovim fork. Wonder if that will be added any time soon...

So I read over the license and you're right, the license does need to be included. However I don't see anything wrong with the project as long as the license is included in its distribution. The license doesn't go against anything Neovim is doing, provided they include the license and provide the project source.

Re: Neovim

#93
post #3

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand I've been thinking on it for quite a long time already, newer shinier Vim is something I secretly wish for. On the other hand I found it quite problematic. The main problem of Vim is Vimscript. So "newer shinier Vim" is Vim with real programming language instead of vimscript. But it's impossible to remove Vimscript: it won't be Vim anymore. It affects not only scrip…

Vim already can be scripted with real programming languages, how did you miss that?

Re: Neovim

#94
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is you broke compatibility now. Will you do it again next year, and fix 100 plugins once more? I am also not a big fun of extreme forms of compatibility, but plenty of projects try to break it only to have people which stick around with old versions for years.

Big projects like Python only break compatibility once every few years, and a lot of thought goes into it. I think it's a lack of respect to the authors of Python and perhaps a lack of authority of Guido that packages are not being upgraded to Python 3. I wonder what would happen, if just a few companies that actively use Python, like Google, would hire a few devs that for a year would only fork and fix Python 2 proj…

Almost all major Python packages have now been upgraded to Python 3. For example, only 3 or 4 of the Top 50 have not been upgraded, and all but 1 of those are in the process of updating.

It's now mostly just the thousands of smaller packages that still are on Python 2 only.

But Python couldn't get away with that more than once every 10 years.

Re: Neovim

#95
Any worry about latency with this new plugin architecture? I'm not quite sure how the current plugins communicate with the main process, but I am sure that one of the things I would most like to see in a re-write of vim is a more responsive interface, even if I have a handful of plugins running.

Re: Neovim

#96
post #21

As someone who uses Vim to write articles and documentation in addition to code, I'd really love to see a richer UI with proper support for features like variable-width fonts. It looks like the developer behind this refactoring effort has some really good ideas for decoupling the Vim engine from the user interface layer. It'd be great if somebody could build a really good cross-platform Qt-based UI on top.

That actually is planned on the first iteration of the fundraiser, see the FAQ

Is there some way to donate via Bitcoin?

Re: Neovim

#97
post #17
post #4

It sounds like they have no interest in getting this stuff pushed back upstream? There's no mention of it on the home page. At this point it smells kind of Emacs/XEmacsish. Hope they can rally immense development effort.

As the author I would like to contribute changes back, search vim_dev mailing list for 'message loop' and 'job control' and you will find two patches I've sent that werent even commented by Bram. This fork changes so much that its impossible that it will ever be accepted

Maybe we can hope for an MRI/YARV scenario!

Re: Neovim

#98
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to be a jerk, but how much do you actually use/have used LaTex? They aren't even similar. They have very few similar use cases. One is a typesetting system the other is a word processor. Sure, documents come out the other end with both but the process and targets are very different. One allows you to quickly and easily make a quality document. One allows you to make the document to look exactly how you w…

I'm by no means a LaTex expert. I've written a few papers and a bunch of reports, nothing published, just undergraduate stuff. I dropped out halfway through my graduate degree, so I'm not what you'd call an academic. But I've seen and read enough to know that you can do impressive things with LaTex. I have another question though, how much have you used Word? I have used it only a couple of times since highschool, bu…

to summarize:

you've written a handful of latex documents, so you're now an expert on what latex is used for and what people want out of it. would it help to point out that given latex is more difficult to use than word, I'd bet most latex users have tried and discarded word in favor of latex? Would that affect your judgements about the relative use cases?

   There's people out there that think that the power in typesetting that LaTex 
   has is mutual exclusive with the speed and usability that Word has. That 
   just isn't so.
Since, well, nothing else offers similar typesetting plus mathematical notation / flexibility, your proof is... what exactly?

If you built a better system, you'd find customers for it.

Re: Neovim

#99
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with almost everything--except for backwards compatibility when it comes to throwing stuff out. There is definite value in it, especially when we're talking about something as old and widely used as vim! This is the part where people are surprised, but I am an extremist. I definitely think backwards compatibility should be among the lowest priorities when making decisions on improving software, especially and…

I think you miss a major thing here: if you put vim with just it's top 100 plugins up against Sublime Text, I think it will easily lose. Why would I even use that? It's because of the long tail of thousands of plugins (your 1% usage) that I choose vim/emacs (more specifically, each power user chooses it because of the set of many of those top 100 hundred plugins + a handful of weird, obscure plugins that fit their ne…

Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think I have any non-top100 vim plugins installed. I could be underestimating the problem by a large margin.

I sort of think that if just the top 100 plugins would be compatible, the authors of the non-top100 plugins would be motivated to migrate, as a sort of herd mentality thing.

Re: Neovim

#100
post #29

Thanks for trying to do what many of us secretly wished we could do but can't because of time/skill constraints. I will definitely move to NeoVim the second it's packaged (is it yet?), regardless if you've changed anything yet. I hate the ideas many programmers have about backwards compatibility, that it's more important than development speed and modern concepts. There is nothing holy about Unix era software, chance…

> Look at SublimeText, it's got 1% of the features of Vim, yet it's converting Vim users left and right, by its sheer usability.

You're confounding usability with "do not need a manual". They're not the same thing at all. Moreover, I reject entirely your assertion that vim is not usable.

vim is amazingly usable; text manipulation commands for example all follow a common structure: [action][times][position]. That means the rules you learn for using "yank" apply just as well to "delete" or "paste" or whatever. Anytime you encounter a new text command you don't even need to wonder how to use it; it's a sure thing it will follow the same structure that you already know.

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