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Neovim

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Re: Neovim

#111

Post by ggreer »

mynameisfiber wrote: post #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.

If anything, the NeoVim will be much more responsive. Vim's current plugin architecture is simple: when plugin code is running, the UI is blocked. If your plugin has an infinite loop, Vim hangs forever. If your plugin does network I/O, Vim hangs until the socket read/write is finished. The only work-around is to use non-blocking sockets and abuse CursorHold/CursorHoldI autocommands and updatetime. That trick breaks the leaderkey, which is a show-stopper for many users. There are similar problems with syntax highlighting. Vim has its own (extremely inefficient) regex engine that blocks the UI when matching.

Re: Neovim

#112

Post by terminus »

tinco wrote: 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…

> We as developers in the Open Source community should be ashamed people are still using Vim to write LaTeX in Bash running on terminal emulators. (Yes, it gives me shivers just thinking about how much each of those technologies sucks when you think about how good it all could be.)

Let's deconstruct each of the pieces we are supposed to be ashamed about, shall we.

LaTeX the language: a wrapper language built on top of TeX for typesetting documents. The idea being to specify higher level document logic (for instance sections, subsections, paragraphs, tables) and if all else fails, then fallback to explicit placement commands. I fail to see anything to be ashamed of in the idea. And, as for your complaints about extendability in some of the comments below: maybe you should look at the texlive distribution or PGF/tikz here: http://www.texample.net/tikz/)

LaTeX/TeX compiler: that's a fair point. But, doesn't have much to do with the language.

vim: a text editor wrapped around using the keyboard efficiently, similar in idea to LaTeX the language in that it asks you to express yourself on a higher plane. Neovim is essentially a more maintainable repackaging of the same model keeping extendability in mind.

bash: wrapper over the early Unix model pipes, ttys, processes (and not threads) etc. The bash scripting language is not all it could be. But, as I said before, the basic model is fairly tied up with Unix itself and is similar in zsh/fish etc.

Re: Neovim

#113

Post by phillmv »

gradstudent wrote: post #100
tinco wrote: 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 mean…

>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.

If by usable we mean "one can be productive in it" then yes that's correct, vim is immensely usable and I've been using it in that sense for six years.

That however is a facile definition of what most people typically mean when we speak of 'usability'.

A tool can be useful while only being barely usable at all. You can do wonderful things with modern airplanes, but most models require painstaking attention and study.

I'm personally of the opinion that we can have a terse input command language while also exposing the rest of the functionality in a way that doesn't punish all users.

I spent all of university using vim purely as a way to indent and colour my code; but intelligently using splits, buffers, tabs, code folding, ctags etc should not require luck to discover and exacting patience to use.

Let's not even get started on the totally inscrutable vimscript. How many more useful things could we have if I didn't have to depend on @tpope for 90% of my plugins?

For many years vim trudged along because it the only other game in town beyond emacs. Now, I only continue to use it because of sunk costs.

So yeah, nerds have to get over their sacred knowledge. Just because you somehow enjoyed reading the :help pages (which… require you to know how to use vim to read!) doesn't mean we have to force everyone to do that.

Or we could all move to Sublime.

Re: Neovim

#114

Post by kcbanner »

tinco wrote: post #47
glesica wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...should be ashamed people are still using Vim to write LaTeX in Bash running on terminal emulators. First, why? It works just fine. Second, is there anything better? I don't know of anything I would prefer to use. So until someone comes up with something, I'll stick to using Vim to write LaTeX in a Bash shell (might upgrade to zsh, we'll see).

No, it doesn't work fine. LateX is slow, inconsistent and needs to be ran multiple times to give a correct result, it has no API, is not extendable in a sane way, it's source code is so arcane there's books written about it, and if you've read the books the only thing you've learned is that trying to reimplement LateX is a fool's errand. And it's syntax is ugly. Markdown is better. Microsoft Word is better. They just…

If you are comparing Word and Markdown to LaTeX I think it's clear you haven't really used LaTeX.

Re: Neovim

#116

Post by edu »

gradstudent wrote: post #100
tinco wrote: 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 mean…

No, you're changing the meaning of usability. It doesn't mean it can be used, but it means that it's easy to learn and use. And vim is powerful but it's not a good example of usability.

Re: Neovim

#117

Post by dllthomas »

tinco wrote: post #47
glesica wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...should be ashamed people are still using Vim to write LaTeX in Bash running on terminal emulators. First, why? It works just fine. Second, is there anything better? I don't know of anything I would prefer to use. So until someone comes up with something, I'll stick to using Vim to write LaTeX in a Bash shell (might upgrade to zsh, we'll see).

No, it doesn't work fine. LateX is slow, inconsistent and needs to be ran multiple times to give a correct result, it has no API, is not extendable in a sane way, it's source code is so arcane there's books written about it, and if you've read the books the only thing you've learned is that trying to reimplement LateX is a fool's errand. And it's syntax is ugly. Markdown is better. Microsoft Word is better. They just…

"A shell that instead of working on character streams worked on structured and annotated data streams, so it could intelligently interpret what is going on?"

I'm not convinced that's worse, but I'm not convinced it's better for the task of being a shell. It's totally, unequivocally, way the hell better when you're trying to build anything large out of it, but taking everything back to byte streams at the interfaces means a huge ability to easily reformulate things to fit them together.

Re: Neovim

#118

Post by andrewflnr »

jude- wrote: post #109
rjzzleep wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not too mention that vim became hip only in the last couple of years. saying it's converting vim users left and right is a little far fetched. most of those users never had any real vim muscle memory to begin with. a lot of "vim" users i saw work just fine without motion commands. the only reason they used it was because they could use it anywhere. whether it's modal or not is totally irrelevant to them.

> not too mention that vim became hip only in the last couple of years. Wait, what? Vim has been in use for a lot longer than that (it was released in 1991), and vi even longer (1976).

"Hip" does not mean remotely the same thing as "in use".

Re: Neovim

#119

Post by terminus »

tinco wrote: post #59
robinhoodexe wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Markdown is better. Microsoft Word is better." Stop comparing oranges to apples. And there's really no "objectively better", it's two different tools with two different uses. Sure, LaTeX could be better, but it's been working on.

I do what I want. Also, LaTeX is a system for creating documents, and Word is a system for creating documents. There's only four important differences: Word has a more modern architecture, Words compiler is integrated into its GUI, Word is closed source, Words source format is not human readable. Apples to Oranges? I can compare these Braeburns to those Fujis just fine thank you.

Those are just the surface differences. The modes in which you use all of these are very different.

Word: explicit WYSIWYG control over typesetting.

LaTeX: semantic level control over typesetting. Additionally provides explicit low level typesetting commands.

Markdown: given how basic (trivial even) Markdown is (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) I'm not sure why it's even in this list.

Re: Neovim

#120

Post by gnoway »

Let me just say that I recently had to build a 'new' UnixWare 7.1.0 system. I was stunned and delighted that I was able to compile vim 7.4 + then-current patches.

Couldn't compile git, python or a couple of other things I wanted, but at least I could use a reasonable editor.

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