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Neovim

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Re: Neovim

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) You run latex twice only on really large and complex documents like books, and if you're writing books (not editing, see antipope.org for details) in Word, then you need professional help. 2) Markdown and LaTeX are designed for different tasks. Next you'll be telling me that if you have a leafblower, you have no need for a chainsaw. 3) Find me the structured and annotated data streams first - and show me that the…

You're completely missing the GP's point. Whether or not LaTeX is better than MS Word for task X is besides the point. It's that LaTeX has many obvious opportunities for improvement, ways to drag it into the current age, while keeping all its fundamental strengths. As do many similarly old tools such as Bash, terminal emulators and Vim. These improvements aren't all that difficult to imagine, but they don't happen, b…

Why expend manpower and energy improving a working solution just to do so when you have so many other broken things that need fixing first? That's a fairly self-answering question. There's a reason the expression is "If it's not broken, don't fix it".

Re: Neovim

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) You run latex twice only on really large and complex documents like books, and if you're writing books (not editing, see antipope.org for details) in Word, then you need professional help. 2) Markdown and LaTeX are designed for different tasks. Next you'll be telling me that if you have a leafblower, you have no need for a chainsaw. 3) Find me the structured and annotated data streams first - and show me that the…

Well, depends on the size of the leaf blower. If you can blow the trees down, certainly don't bother with the chain saw!

Newton would have some things to say about that, but you wouldn't hear him because of your doppler shift.

Re: Neovim

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) You run latex twice only on really large and complex documents like books, and if you're writing books (not editing, see antipope.org for details) in Word, then you need professional help. 2) Markdown and LaTeX are designed for different tasks. Next you'll be telling me that if you have a leafblower, you have no need for a chainsaw. 3) Find me the structured and annotated data streams first - and show me that the…

markdown is perfect for forum comments, but idiotic to extend too far. if you’re a programmer wanting to write a book in markdown, you’ll find yourself thinking of markdown syntax extensions more than thinking about the book. if you want extensibility and still a rather lightweight syntax, try restructuredtext. it has exactly one flaw compared to markdown, which is the hideous inline link syntax (which practically fo…

Or you could just use LaTeX, which has been used for writing books for decades (the word you're looking for is "debugged" and the phrase is either "well understood" or "well documented").

And yes, there are efforts underway to improve it (LaTeX3) but 2e works so well, there's not been much drive there.

And if you find LaTeX is so hard, there's always LyX...

Re: Neovim

#284
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…

Um, I've never heard of SublimeText. I like vim because it is cake to ssh into a server and quickly / efficiently modify a text file.

And there is nothing shameful about developers accomodating my desire to use a command-line text editor to create/edit TeX files in whatever terminal I am using.

Normally I create / edit TeX using LaTeXila but it is fanstatic that I can do so with vim and when I don't have access to LaTeXila I use vim for TeX editing, and I am quite glad I can.

With software that works in a standard shell environment, I can ssh into a networked computer from my Android tablet (Better Terminal Emulator Pro and Hackers Keyboard) and do actual work. Far more convenient than carrying my laptop everywhere and also faster than checking out source, firing up a GUI, and then committing the source.

Terminals ARE good technology and we would be worse off without them.

Re: Neovim

#285
post #47
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…

LaTeX is not slow or inconsistent.

You only need to run it multiple times if you use features that require it, and that is because one pass generates code to be read in a second pass.

The syntax is not ugly. It's a macro programming language.

If you don't like use vim (or emaca with AucTeX) to write it, look at LaTeXila - it's pretty good. If on Windows, notepad++ is also free and has excellent support for LaTeX.

Re: Neovim

#286
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It baffles me why in 2014, some developers still prefer to work as if UNIX System V had just been released. Because (a) some of us aren't convinced that things like IDEs give a better view of what's going on in the system; (b) some of us think that fundamental tools like terminal emulators, editors and so on should be debugged and stable because we have to earn our mortgage payments using them and chasing the shiny…

IDE aren't new and shiny, I have been using them since the early 90's.

(a) To some of us, that's not that long ago :D (b) Vim is an IDE. No, seriously, if you can run the debugger, the compiler and a plethora of other tools from within it, it is an IDE. You might not like it, but... (c) IDE, DDE, doesn't matter. Some of us work faster in IDEs, some in DDEs. Now, if you don't grok what's happening from your source down to the metal, that matters.

(d) When did I specifically pick out IDEs as the sole example of new and shiny? Or did you just read my comment without parsing it?

Re: Neovim

#287
post #248
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I mean it's not like 'more modern' alternatives haven't been created... They just haven't caught on among this group of people because this group of people values functionality and does not give a damn how old something is. People have made fancy new shells build around things other than bytes through pipes, people have created new replacements for terminal emulators, and people have created fancy GUI document…

Because many of the people that learned those old stuff were young when those tools were new and don't want to learn anything else. Habits die very slow.

And because the shell utilities are more versatile and often better.

Re: Neovim

#288
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in the list because it's what I would use for my thesis, if I'd do one now :) It's basic, but it has the semantics for most stuff, and can easily be extended for more. I'd do all formula's/drawings in external tools. Word nowadays has semantic typesetting controls too, I think since they started that ribbon thing that it has become useable. If you stick to using their semantic things I think you can do a pretty…

Writing a thesis using only markdown sounds extremely painful. Are you going to create all your figures elsewhere and then include them as images? How are you going to create your list of figures? And your table of contents? How are you going to create, maintain, and organize your list of references? I could go on.

Plus there are many advances to doing figures in LaTeX - such as the ability to have you math typeset the same way as in non figures.

Re: Neovim

#289
post #109

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).

Yes but emacs was for more popular than vim for awhile.

Re: Neovim

#290
post #111

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 t…

The regex engine was updated in version 7.4 and now is noticeably faster.
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