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Neovim

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331–340 of 372 posts

Re: Neovim

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Are you going to create all your figures elsewhere and then include them as images? This is what most people do in physics and astronomy. You make the plot in some kind of plotting package and export it to a vector format. In astronomy, the journals only recently started accepting PDF figures in addition to EPS. In my experience doing all of my figures in LaTeX is significantly more painful than using a real plotti…

As long as you can get it in vector format, it doesn't matter.

What about tables? Granted they aren't fun to make, but I am not aware of any methods of creating them outside of a latex document.

Re: Neovim

#332
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Writing my thesis with markdown was one of the best decisions i made. I wrote 99% of my master thesis in markdown (50 pages w/o interviews). 1) I didn't have a lot of images so i just wrote FIXME: Image Foo.png where they belonged. 2) I wrote my Citations Plain in there (e.g. Wocken, 1985, 7 ff.), using a special folder for all sources i really used in Mendeley. 3) Writing in markdown i could just c&p perfectly forma…

Most content can be written in something other than LaTeX, especially in early drafts. I always start drafting papers in Markdown. I cannot imagine going from start to finish with Markdown though. Especially since most papers have fairly strict style guidelines and length restrictions.

After a draft or two, transitions to LaTeX is a must. [Pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) for the win!

Re: Neovim

#333

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...

The license removal was completely accidental, I will include it as soon as I get back to it.

As promised, here is the commit with the origin Vim license -- https://github.com/neovim/neovim/commit/7cadf15eee1f377e9a7b...

Re: Neovim

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an apples to oranges comparison. I want to draw a conformal mapping diagram in word and also write a 3-vector of the navier-stokes equations. Also, I want to do a lot of tensor arithmetic with tons of superscripts and subscripts and arrows. Tell me how any of this is accomplished in Word please. Saying Word is easier to us is like saying BASIC is easier than C++.

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…

> If you try to use LaTeX with a biomedical researcher, they will look at you very funny.

I'm a biomedical researcher, and I use LaTeX. It's my preferred method of document preparation. I know many others who use LaTeX as well.

Re: Neovim

#335
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…

I am honestly amazed at how feistily every 'hacker' here is defending LaTeX in response to your comment. I agree with you for the most part. This whole "it's apples to oranges" claim is bullshit. Both Word as well as LaTeX can be used for anything from writing a resume, making a technical paper with a few simple equations, to writing an entire Vector or Linear Algebra textbooks. When you have two options for doing th…

Have you ever tried to write math/physics paper using MS Word? It is completely broken comparing to LaTeX+decent text editor (vim, emacs, kyle, whatever). Writing equations in Word is pain, inserting bibliography is pain, inserting figures is pain. Printed results do not match screen version, if you need to collaborate with someone you have problems with diffs and different versions of Word. Another use for LaTeX is making slides for presentations. Word or Markdown can't be used for this. And if you use PowerPoint for slides you are in trouble. Most probably your Greek letters in formulas will be invisible or software will crash in process.

Re: Neovim

#336
post #306
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree. For me, Vi and Emacs are only when I don't have an option in terms of IDE support, even though I know at least Emacs quite well. What can I say, the world of Amiga GUIs, Smalltalk and Lisp environments spoiled me as an IDE fanboy. It baffles me why in 2014, some developers still prefer to work as if UNIX System V had just been released.

I started with IDE and then moved to vim. Not because it's "cool". It's productive. There are several reasons. First off, movements. Almost any IDE now has some plugin to imitate vim-style keyboard shortcuts, but they honestly suck at it. Next thing is it's fast and lightweight, which surprisingly feels more important than I thought before. I don't have to wait for java-based IDE's GC to stop running or something. Th…

Definitely try Emacs. Preview LaTeX is nice, Rope is also here. Also I find it easier to set the system to do all text editing in Emacs than in Vim. I mean that one can use Emacs to write mails, chats, edit all types of code, write and post blog posts, web pages and so on.

Re: Neovim

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody thinks it's a good idea to rewrite something just to make it "newer". The idea is to rewrite (or maybe just refactor) these tools to make them better.

It's also not "fixing what's not broken", but improving something that could... well... be improved.

Re: Neovim

#338
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neo Vi Improved. We suck at naming things :) Yeah, I have mixed feelings as well. I love my Vim, don't touch it. And yet, vimscript does suck and better separation from core and UI could allow for very interesting things. Also, no one really cares about Vi compatibility anymore and cleaning the scary old C code base could make it much more accessible. I guess we'll see.

I think it should be called Vimim, Vi Improved Improved

Or Vim for short.

You know: Vim IMproved.

Re: Neovim

#339

Finally, someone took this step. I really appreciate his work. Don't get me wrong. Vim is an awesome editor and it is the only editor I'm using now. I've been using it for decades and still cannot find an editor which can replace it. Sorry, emacs, I tried several times but failed. I know it's my problem but I'm too familiar with vim's short-cuts. However, I do think we can still do some improvement on vim, especially…

There's viper mode.

Though, aside from a brief dalliance with emacs in the late 1990s, I've used vi / vim since 1987.

Re: Neovim

#340

300 comments in 24 hours. nothing better than people word-fighting about writing tools... -bowerbird

Right, haha, like comparing tool that does the same thing and just justifying or proving that this one is better -_-
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