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The State of Vim

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Re: The State of Vim

#111

Post by openmarkand »

myaccountonhn wrote: post #63
openmarkand wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried several times and I always switched back to vanilla vim. Neovim has various nice features but it requires a lot of time to migrate correctly IMHO. 20 years of habits are hard to leave, I think. Sure the configuration file is retro compatible, but some of the plugins are better suited for neovim and vice versa. I use a dozen of them and if I switch permanently to neovim I'd like to start fresh using more…

I found the neovim community to operate a bit like the node ecosystem, you pull in a plugin for every problem that solves already solved problems their own way. The plugins are also very flashy with tons of animations, colors and emojis, which to me is just distracting. That said I think people should use what they like, and I am happy that there is a big community developing an alternative to VSCode. I just didn't f…

> The plugins are also very flashy with tons of animations, colors and emojis, which to me is just distracting

I also have seen that the very first time I tried neovim. Some people may like it but I consider a terminal to be as simple as possible. Furthermore, I use often the CLI on non-GUI terminals where such non-ASCII characters can have various side effects (e.g. unicode bars, braille like progress bar and so on, those destroy your serial terminal line).

Re: The State of Vim

#112

Post by exogenousdata »

qazxcvbnm wrote: post #44
Ferret7446 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really compare vim and emacs beyond a superficial level. Emacs is fundamentally an interactive shell, like Bash. It has a text editor, also like Bash. It is of course generally more powerful and featureful than Bash. Hence, people sometimes live in Emacs, because it's a shell like Bash or Gnome or KDE. I use Emacs and VSCode. VSCode for some code repos, and Emacs for general computer usage. Meanwhile, Vim i…

Just for the other side of the picture, I live in vim and use it as my terminal multiplexer. Vim’s my shell. I have thousands of buffers in vim and practically never leave it. I’ve used terminal multiplexers for years before I switched to vim in that capacity and never looked back. The integration it’s allowed between all my buffers and commands and shells is difficult to match in my opinion.

As a 3rd anecdote, I used vim for 10 years as my primary editor and “shell”. Then 10 years ago I learned tmux and fell in love with its window multiplexing. Now I use vim strictly as an editor/splitter. But I use tmux to split my code from my repl window. And maintain multiple windows where I’m working on different projects.

Re: The State of Vim

#113

Post by LeonidasXIV »

volemo wrote: post #25
krykp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With nvim, there has been quite the resurgence of Vim. Good software tends to be resilient. I believe both emacs and vim will see many, many more years.

I wonder, will there be something to emacs, as nvim is to vim?

Let's not forget that GNU Emacs also had his competitor, XEmacs which spurred GNU Emacs to improve. Similar with GCC and EGCS where the EGCS later became the new GCC.

Re: The State of Vim

#114

Post by linsomniac »

112233 wrote: post #46
porphyra wrote: post #11

Many of the Vim nerds I know, including myself, have switched over to Neovim. Only when using a remote server with a default installation do I use regular old Vim.

Neovim sounded like a good idea, so I switched, too. Then after an update, it broke mouse selection in terminal, by turning on some crazy option by default. I still have to search how to disable it each time. Ok, things like that happen. Then, after another update, it broke terminal update. Like, your screen scrolls up or down a line and the text does not get redrawn correctly. Is it a wezterm issue? Well, the origin…

Fellow wezterm user here, I occasionally have redraw issues with neovim, maybe once a month of heavy use. Whatever happened to ^L to redraw the screen, it seems to no longer work...

I've moved away from maintaining my own vimrc, and towards vim distributions, and they all seem to be neovim targeted. First it was LunarVim, and more recently after Lunar stopped being maintained to AstroVim. They have been quite good at batteries included vim, and I'll never go back to vim without LSP.

Re: The State of Vim

#115

Post by jitl »

wruza wrote: post #70
porphyra wrote: post #11

Many of the Vim nerds I know, including myself, have switched over to Neovim. Only when using a remote server with a default installation do I use regular old Vim.

Neovim turned itself into a pop-blink IDE which some people never wanted. It's good that it serves the needs of its fans, but it's also good that Vim stayed in its own tracks. Losing Vim as it is would be a great loss for many.

With no config file Neovim is just vim but with mouse mode enabled by default. With Lua and the new APIs it’s much easier to write powerful plugins that do crazy shit and use animation but none of that happens by default, you need to go out of your way to get that kind of action, same as with regular vim.

Re: The State of Vim

#116

Post by ahartmetz »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #94
normie3000 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> potential rouge actors Communist assets?

Not necessarily. Sometimes people infiltrate projects with the intent of sabotaging them. This may be done by causing a controversy, or else making bad technical decisions on purpose.

I think you missed the joke. "Rouge" is French for red. Most likely it was meant to say "rogue" but it was misspelled.

Re: The State of Vim

#117

Post by sgarland »

myaccountonhn wrote: post #63
openmarkand wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried several times and I always switched back to vanilla vim. Neovim has various nice features but it requires a lot of time to migrate correctly IMHO. 20 years of habits are hard to leave, I think. Sure the configuration file is retro compatible, but some of the plugins are better suited for neovim and vice versa. I use a dozen of them and if I switch permanently to neovim I'd like to start fresh using more…

I found the neovim community to operate a bit like the node ecosystem, you pull in a plugin for every problem that solves already solved problems their own way. The plugins are also very flashy with tons of animations, colors and emojis, which to me is just distracting. That said I think people should use what they like, and I am happy that there is a big community developing an alternative to VSCode. I just didn't f…

> The plugins are also very flashy with tons of animations, colors and emojis, which to me is just distracting.

I don't think I've seen plugins with animations (nor would I want to). Agreed that emoji in the terminal, modulo useful glyphs like language logos next to files in a directory tree [0], are distracting.

What I don't understand are people who add a million plugins, and then wonder why the startup performance is terrible. I have a fair amount, including some I honestly rarely or never need, and startup time is still 75 msec, which is fast enough for me not to be bothered.

[0]: https://github.com/ms-jpq/chadtree

Re: The State of Vim

#118

Post by arusahni »

linsomniac wrote: post #114
112233 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neovim sounded like a good idea, so I switched, too. Then after an update, it broke mouse selection in terminal, by turning on some crazy option by default. I still have to search how to disable it each time. Ok, things like that happen. Then, after another update, it broke terminal update. Like, your screen scrolls up or down a line and the text does not get redrawn correctly. Is it a wezterm issue? Well, the origin…

Fellow wezterm user here, I occasionally have redraw issues with neovim, maybe once a month of heavy use. Whatever happened to ^L to redraw the screen, it seems to no longer work... I've moved away from maintaining my own vimrc, and towards vim distributions, and they all seem to be neovim targeted. First it was LunarVim, and more recently after Lunar stopped being maintained to AstroVim. They have been quite good at…

Do you have your terminfo set up properly? I used to experience bad glitching when working with vertical splits, but it went away once I applied this. https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/config/lua/config/term.html

Re: The State of Vim

#119

Post by cassepipe »

I had a easy to maintain, easy to understand vim + ALE + Gutentags + ... setup for C/C++ development and it worked very well but when I got into webdev I just gave up and jump to a neovim distribution as I was not able to catch up. So in the end neovim got me not because it is technically superior but because the community created distributions, which I am very grateful for (R.I.P Lunarvim)

EDIT: Ok, maybe the reason distributions were created is because the integration of some lsp/treesitter stuff enabled it/made it easier ? So if not technically superior, at least more capable

Re: The State of Vim

#120

Post by ykonstant »

> How can we make Vim9 script, the new Vim scripting language, more widely used?

One way is to inform users and prospective plugin writers that

1) Vim9 script is vastly superior to the old Vimscript, to the point where it is not unpleasant to use, and

2) it is much more conductive to writing text editor code than the general purpose Lua.

Of course this still does not mean that people will want to learn yet another scripting language to write Vim plugins in particular when they already know Lua, but it is very important to be adequately informed about the two above points.

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