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

Neovim 0.8 Released

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 230 posts

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#111

Post by malikNF »

modernerd wrote: post #48

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

In addition to programming, part of my job involves doing linux admin stuff, when I login to a server I expect vim to be there, and if not it takes a few seconds to install it.

I usually try something on my local machine and switch to the server and do this back and forth and sometimes the other way around, I have a test server where I test something before trying it on my local machine. Having the same text editor on all of these environments mean I don't have to context switch much, also I have my own custom config which I have been improving over the years and the fact I have multiple vim instances running right now and they are all consuming less than 120MB memory and the fact it responds really really fast is a really nice addition.

When I first started using vim I remember I asked one of my friends the following, "what the hell is wrong with people, why do they love using this god awful garbage" I remember my friend asking me to keep trying for a little while longer. Thank heavens I took his advice, I can't really remember when it happened but one day it just made sense.

Then I saw a neovim config file, and how good it looked with lua scripting, changed my old vim config in to a neovim one, and now I use neovim.

(plus I still have trust issues with a certain multi billion dollar company)

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#112

Post by gillh »

We recently started providing standardized neovim centric dotfiles setup to developers at our startup and this setup has improved productivity quite a lot.

Our neovim "distribution" is highly geared towards our tech stack (Golang etc.) and provides fzf based command palette.

See: https://github.com/fluxninja/dotfiles

We aren't using neovim's built-in LSP as we found it to be a bit immature. Instead we are providing coc.nvim.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#113

Post by modernerd »

johnfn wrote: post #106
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? VS Code is a proprietary, spyware-riddled, resource-wasting worked example of why "modern" software sucks. Also for my personal use, everything that's not vim suffers from being not vim; it would cost me effort to switch for no cl…

> VS Code is a proprietary, spyware-riddled, resource-wasting worked example of why "modern" software sucks. Perspectives like these (and others in the thread) remind me that there exists a separate cohort of engineers from people like myself which have absolutely polar opposite views. I respect your opinions, though I couldn't disagree more with them! :) Well, except the bit about VSCode having "spyware". That's not…

> and you should just call it that instead.

And then turn it off using the built-in setting:

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry#_dis...

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#114

Post by norman784 »

ptato wrote: post #78
modernerd wrote: post #48

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

Modal editing in VS Code is not good enough. I still use it for certain things. Just not the bulk of my programming. When helix is more ready, I will probably switch to it.

I use both, there are certain nuances with helix right now, like exploring the project structure, there's a sidebar in the works, but is not ready yet, also when you need to create new files I find it easier to do it in vscode.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#115

Post by norman784 »

rockwotj wrote: post #63
modernerd wrote: post #48

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

I enjoy a terminal workflow, and helix doesn't actually have vim key bindings and many years of vim use is hard to switch. EDIT: I'm also a tmux user and I can't live without a replacement for this plugin: https://github.com/christoomey/vim-tmux-navigator

Check wezterm, it has something similar to tmux splits and it's nice.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#116

Post by jofer »

modernerd wrote: post #48

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

I can't really agree that VS Code or Helix are "great out of the box". I haven't tried zed. VS Code feels really awful to me (note: this is probably just me) without weeks spent re-configuring it. Even then, it's _way_ too heavy for my laptop to run reliably. Maybe my brain just works differently, but I feel like VSCode fights against me at every turn. Helix is nifty, but also feels like it gets in my way more than it helps.

I've never understood the advantage of "rich development environments". The refactoring tools and other fancy aids seem to never work. I wind up using regexes + manual intervention anyway. Also, I don't want to use git through a gui. Leave me be in the terminal where I have everything I need at my fingertips as fast as I can think.

Syntax highlighting, linting, completion, and docs are all nice, but I have that in vim. I can run vim in the dev instance I'm ssh-ed into (which is 99.99% of how I work, anyway -- my work laptop is ancient and they won't replace it). I just can't see what those tools add, even for very large codebases.

My configuration for vim began in the 90's. I've never put that much work into it at any one time, though it has grown quite complex over time. There are a bunch of plugins I use manged in the config file. 90% of the functionality I need works without those plugins, but even when I need to install them from scratch it's easy to go from "scp config file over" to "full setup" with one command.

So in summary, I use vim because it's part of a larger set of standard unix-y tools that are heavily ingrained into muscle memory. The biggest advantage of vim in many ways is that it's a relatively rich environment (e.g. linting, syntax highlighting, doc hints, etc) that I can ctrl-Z to immediately be back in the terminal with. Other than that, it gets out of my way, and I don't think about the editor at all, I think about what I'm doing (decades of muscle memory helps a lot, though -- I'm incapable of not using vim keybindings to edit code, I think).

I should move over to neovim, but mostly haven't yet. That's more due to a couple of weird plugins than anything else, though.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#117

Post by cercatrova »

massysett wrote: post #90
modernerd wrote: post #48

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

I was not familiar with Helix or Zed, so I took a look at the links. Both webpages prominently state that the editors are written in Rust. This reduces my interest in both projects. As a user, I do not care what language my editor is implemented in. Maybe I want a fast editor, or maybe I want a feature-rich editor. The closest I would come to caring about this is if I want an extensible editor - can I extend these ed…

> This reduces my interest in both projects.

That's funny, it's the opposite for me.

> As a user, I do not care what language my editor is implemented in.

I do care. I don't like using Electron apps, even if I have to grudgingly use them a la VSCode. If an app is in Electron or some other slow framework like a Python GUI, my interest immediately drops to zero. If it's in Rust or some other low level language, at least I know it'll be fast.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#118

Post by gkfasdfasdf »

modernerd wrote: post #48

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

neovim/vim are lightning fast, and since they are usually installed on remote servers as well it is nice to have a consistent experience editing files whether I am working locally or in a remote shell somewhere.

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#119

Post by ar_lan »

modernerd wrote: post #48

If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? It's impressive to see what the Neovim community has built — preconfigured setups like https://nvchad.com/ are especially wild. But it still feels like a huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and _fragility_ just to reach parity with V…

> why you chose it over VS Code

VS Code has always felt clunky to me. It always felt like a halfway house between the speed and simplicity of Vim and the maximalism offered by JetBrains IDEs. I also just generally don’t love GUI apps for code because I desire to be right in my shell.

NeoVim offers LSP, Tree Sitter, DAP, and easy extensibility to reach full parity with any IDE, but with the benefit of it being:

* Faster (both in processing speed but also in my workflow). I can navigate significantly faster in Vim than I can in any other editor. * More familiar, to me.

I can’t speak to Helix as I’ve never heard of it, but in general, the Vim community is very strong and long-lasting - it’s been a top tier editor for the past few decades and will likely continue to keep that place (albeit NeoVim is the currently favored flavor for me).

Beyond that, the extensibility of Neovim is unmatched in VSCode.

I also do most of my development in a VM and VS code remote shell is significantly slower for me than just ssh + neovim.

> huge amount of work, hoop jumping, and fragility to reach parity

This seems inaccurate. Maybe it’s because I use NixOS but my editor experience is literally the least fragile piece of software I use. I’ve ran into far more issues in both GoLand and VS Code than I have in Neovim. Perhaps because Neovim is less of a walled garden?

It took me about a weekend to properly learn Lua and how Neovim works, and after that, I was set.

> spent months tweaking

I don’t know what process you took, but properly learning the tool from the ground up and minimally adding useful plugins as you go should not take much time at all. I don’t really touch my editor config unless I need to install a new LSP server - it always just works.

—

At the end of the day, the best tool is the one that enables you to be most productive. I find almost anything outside of the terminal clunky (the main exception is my browser).

Re: Neovim 0.8 Released

#120

Post by jrm4 »

johnfn wrote: post #106
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you use Neovim, can you share why you chose it over VS Code, or one of the new terminal-based editors like https://helix-editor.com/ , or new native GUI editors like https://zed.dev/ ? VS Code is a proprietary, spyware-riddled, resource-wasting worked example of why "modern" software sucks. Also for my personal use, everything that's not vim suffers from being not vim; it would cost me effort to switch for no cl…

> VS Code is a proprietary, spyware-riddled, resource-wasting worked example of why "modern" software sucks. Perspectives like these (and others in the thread) remind me that there exists a separate cohort of engineers from people like myself which have absolutely polar opposite views. I respect your opinions, though I couldn't disagree more with them! :) Well, except the bit about VSCode having "spyware". That's not…

No. Microsoft's general reputation for spying on its users renders "spyware" a reasonable shorthand for what it either does now, or perhaps is reasonably likely to do at some time in the future.

I would fall back to the softer "telemetry" ONLY IF they were to provide some sort of genuinely reliable affirmation that it's not spying, which I don't think they could do today absent legal or other generally obvious incentive.

Post reply on HN