Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Neovim

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 372 posts

Re: Neovim

#291

Post by efuquen »

markdennehy wrote: post #281
skrebbel wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

We have tools that have virtually been unchanged for over 20 years. While the consistency and stability has been nice, there has been a lot of good things that have happened in software development and technology that those tools could really benefit from. You're honestly going to tell me you don't think that taking a second look at these tools and seeing how we could improve them would be a good thing?

What you're basically advocating is nobody should innovate because things are "good enough". With that sort of attitude we would never have any progress on anything.

Re: Neovim

#292

Post by nailer »

orbifold wrote: post #273
microtonal wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not slow, it runs in under a second on most documents I have authored. It is slow. On my PhD thesis, it took more than one minute at some point, on an SSD. Not very convenient if you are tweaking figures and equations, and want to preview a change quickly.

Then you did it wrong. You should have just factored your thesis in multiple files, for example used one for each chapter.

That sounds like a workaround.

Re: Neovim

#293

Post by ibash »

jmehman wrote: post #60

I really like what he's setting out to do here but I was a bit put off by the fundraising setup. If the target isn't met the donations still go to him, and there's no pledge to do anything on that case. Is that right or did I miss something?

On the other hand the fundraiser is now over $8,000 which is enough for at least a month of work, I think it'll make the 10k in short order.

Re: Neovim

#294

Post by timtadh »

nailer wrote: post #292
orbifold wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you did it wrong. You should have just factored your thesis in multiple files, for example used one for each chapter.

That sounds like a workaround.

Actually, it is a pretty useful feature. I break my documents up into multiple files and can compile pieces of them together for different audiences. Want an executive summary of my research just build the abstract + a summary. Want to review the literature with my advisor, build the just the literature review.

However, I will agree that using it to address slowness of a build process is just a hack.

Re: Neovim

#295

Post by coldtea »

markdennehy wrote: post #283
flying-sheep wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

>which has been used for writing books for decades

Well, mostly math and science books. Very few (if any) fancy and well typespeced books by major publishers have been made with LaTeX. I know, because I know that industry. So, while TeX was once created to be a general typesetting solution, it has been relegated to something math and cs geeks use for their papers.

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

A not really maintained, relic of a program, that tries too hard to work around the issues raised by a backend like LaTeX that wasn't really created with such GUI control in mind.

Re: Neovim

#296

Post by tincholio »

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…

> Markdown is better. Microsoft Word is better. They just both lack certain things we need, and LaTeX has those things.

That comparison right there, between systems in entirely different categories, tells me you have no idea about what you're saying.

Re: Neovim

#297

Post by markdennehy »

efuquen wrote: post #291
markdennehy wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

We have tools that have virtually been unchanged for over 20 years. While the consistency and stability has been nice, there has been a lot of good things that have happened in software development and technology that those tools could really benefit from. You're honestly going to tell me you don't think that taking a second look at these tools and seeing how we could improve them would be a good thing? What you're b…

That's not what I'm advocating. What I'm advocating is not wasting time and effort rewriting working tools just because the rewrite would be newer.

Which is not what you're saying I'm advocating.

Re: Neovim

#298

Post by aaronem »

glesica wrote: post #40
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…

> ...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).

There is something better. It's called Org-mode, and it is part of Emacs, although that shouldn't scare you off immediately; I'll talk more about that shortly, but first want to mention some features you might find appealing. You can write LaTeX documents in it if you like, or you can write Org-mode documents in a far more humane syntax, which the editor understands on a semantic level, and which can incorporate LaTeX snippets where they're needed while otherwise insulating you from having to write LaTeX source by hand. (Although of course you can if you want to.)

Org-mode has exporters for LaTeX, PDF (via LaTeX), HTML, DocBook, PDF (via DocBook), various flavors of plain text, OpenDocument text (which can get you to Word if you want to go there), all of which work quite well; if you need to supply LaTeX source as input to some external pipeline, Org makes it possible for you to do so. On the other hand, if you prefer to spend as little time as possible dealing with raw LaTeX, which in my experience seems like a sensible attitude to take, Org makes that possible as well. And on the third hand, if you need to write LaTeX source directly for complex diagrams and such, or if you want to override the way Org generates LaTeX in specific cases but let it handle the rest of a document on its own, Org doesn't get in your way there, either.

You can also include code snippets in an Org-mode file, of arbitrary length and in arbitrary languages. If they're in a language Emacs understands, you can have it render them with syntax highlighting, but that's just the tip of the iceberg; you can also have Org-mode execute those snippets, whether ad hoc or as part of the compilation process, and it can incorporate their results into the document verbatim or after a variety of transformations, and also use those results as input to other code snippets in the same document. This is why the literate programming folks love Org-mode as much as they do; there's nothing quite like it for interweaving text and code and then being easily able to do interesting things with both.

And, although Emacs is by far the most powerful editor for Org-mode files, there's nothing saying you have to use Emacs to edit Org-mode files. You can, for example, use Vim to write your Org-mode source, probably with some degree of highlighting via some vimscript file or other. You can then invoke Emacs in batch mode to compile your Org source into whatever format you want to come out the other end, without ever having to see or deal with the Emacs editor interface, and without having to involve yourself save on the most superficial level with Emacs Lisp. (I'll be happy to provide the general form of such an invocation, if you're interested; let me know.)

Re: Neovim

#299

Post by mbreese »

banachtarski wrote: post #246
mbreese wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what most people would do? Use a dedicated program to create the plots and equations, export it as a PDF, and embed that in Word. Instead of LaTeX being the de facto standard for all publishing, it is relegated to very specialized uses in mathematics and some engineering. If you try to use LaTeX with a biomedical researcher, they will look at you very funny. Hell, I just had a postdoc send me figures as part…

Jesus nothing is wrong. Read my comment again. I'm saying it's an apples to oranges comparison. If BASIC is all you need great. If word is all you need great. If you can get by with importing from gnuplot or R or matlab or whatever great. I'm not saying one is superior to the other. I'm saying that when I want to draw a commutative diagram, I'd rather do it in LaTeX with tikz or the xy package. I'm sick of the "HN st…

What I'm trying to say is that for the vast majority of peoe that have to produce documents, it isn't an apples to oranges comparison. For most proe, Word and LaTeX do the same thing. And one of those is vastly easier to use to get their job done. So while LaTeX is the technically superior, Word will still get the job done. And because of the network effects that working with collaborators has, People like me are stuck using Word even if I'd rather have my papers written in something else.

In some fields LaTeX is the easier method to produce documents (good luck with anything more than a simple equation in Word), but those are relatively small niches.

Re: Neovim

#300

Post by srik »

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…

But I want to write on my text editor on a terminal emulator because I have access to all of the built in operating system utilities.
Post reply on HN