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The State of Vim

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Re: The State of Vim

#161

Post by mmooss »

Anthony-G wrote: post #148
mmooss wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do Neovim users feel the need to take down Bram and Vim? Now you are taking credit for Bram's work! Why not make an application you love and leave everyone else alone? The community's behavior - what I see - is a deterrent to using Neovim.

> Now you are taking credit for Bram's work! That’s a baseless accusation. I’ve been using Vim for about 25 years, and over the years have contributed small changes to some of the default plugins maintained by third parties (mostly language syntax and `filetype` configuration files). I have yet to even try Neovim but I too noticed that the rate of minor version releases and new features in Vim had increased after the…

It's not at all baseless - the basis is the parent (now GGP) comment, even if you disagree with the analysis.

Re: The State of Vim

#162

Post by sodapopcan »

otikik wrote: post #136
ykonstant wrote: post #120

> 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 sc…

> it is much more conductive to writing text editor code than the general purpose Lua. Lua is very much not a general-purpose Language. It can be used like one, but it's a specialized language thought to live inside a "host" application, which it then controls. Which does seem to fit the usecase here. Would you be able to substantiate your claim that it is more conductive to text editor code? > it is not unpleasant t…

Speaking purely technically here, vim9/L has an actual standard library tailored specifically to Vim. Lua has no standard library and you just end up delegating to vimscript anyway. But ya, if you want to use Lua for whatever reason then it's a pretty hard sell. But that's sorta what OP is getting at... how to make it more attractive.

Re: The State of Vim

#163

Post by alp1n3_eth »

I'm glad I was introduced to NeoVim, because it led me to using Vim bindings in Zed.

As a new user to NeoVim, I was okay with investing some time, but man it feels like each update to NeoVim itself, or even the popular plugins, breaks something that I then need to go hunt down and fix. Every answer online isn't any better, pointing to 5 different doc pages. I like my IDEs to "just work" and continue to do so after I have them configured.

Re: The State of Vim

#164

Post by karthink »

ykonstant wrote: post #129
volemo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Emacs seems to be a local maximum that is difficult to overcome. An entire Lisp Machine environment would be better, but it would be a tremendous undertaking and the specialists, i.e. emacs devs, don't seem to be interested in such a thing. A multithreaded version of emacs would also be an interesting addition; I read some arguments against moving emacs to a multithreaded model, but I don't really remember them.

> I read some arguments against moving emacs to a multithreaded model, but I don't really remember them.

Everyone including the maintainers would like this to happen. The arguments against it are technical hurdles. Emacs is a large ball of global state and the lisp evaluator hooks into everything, including the display engine, so it's not clear to anyone how to disentangle things to the point where the interpreter lock can be released.

Re: The State of Vim

#165

Post by giancarlostoro »

t_mahmood wrote: post #158
giancarlostoro wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume slowly over time Neovim will just win over vim because of this. I do want to say its much more capable than the original vim, I don't know that vim has a headless mode or that it intends on it, but Neovim has that, plus it can essentially let you write plugins in any language with its plugin RPC protocol. So if you want a plugin that targets your language you can leverage existing libraries that directly sup…

Vim does have headless mode, iirc. I used it with eclipse or netbeans, can't exactly remember. I have Neovim, it still haven't replaced vim yet. But I see the reasoning, IF I want to use a editor to do heavy development, Neovim seems to have more detailed syntax highlighting, and yes LSP integration good. I use intelliJ with ideaVim for my work, and I don't think these editors can fill the capability that JetBrains o…

> I use intelliJ with ideaVim for my work, and I don't think these editors can fill the capability that JetBrains offers. Even though vim has a special place in my heart

I keep wanting them to make a Neovim headless plugin for their IDEs.

Re: The State of Vim

#166

Post by wruza »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #83
wruza wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just set up a Neovim configuration from scratch and I have no idea what you are talking about. I did install a completion plugin literally called blink, but even that supports keybinding activation.

My transition was unsuccessful for a differrent reason, although I still think that while being open to change, it’s ideologically correct to stay with ideas you are aligned with.

When I tried it, nvim-qt was hard to associate with file extensions on windows (required something like “-- “filename”” in different shapes and hours of regedit debugging, can’t remember now), then nvim itself had issues with refreshing on manual window resize and with autoresizing the window on setting ‘lines’. And a few more os integration related issues. It was basically unusable gui-wise so I bailed out due to no good reason to stay.

I was probably talking about that astro-thing that works like a christmas tree and was the main selling point at the time.

Re: The State of Vim

#167

Post by wruza »

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…

Does this imply that Vim has no LSP support? Cause ALE is a Vim-spirited zeroconf-ish LSP bridge for those who don’t know.

Re: The State of Vim

#168

Post by cassepipe »

pdimitar wrote: post #155
cassepipe wrote: post #119

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…

I loved LunarVim as well but after switching to AstroNvim I like it more. And it's easy to customize even for a very burned out dev like myself.

I also jumped ship to AstroNvim but I still prefer Lunarvim, I liked having all the config in just one file and some of its defaults. But I agree, Astro is the best distro currently maintained distro in my opinion.

Re: The State of Vim

#169

Post by wruza »

maleldil wrote: post #110
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…

Vim is more stable simply because it changes less often. Neovim is constantly improving its APIs, and that can break stuff. If you don't want to deal with breaking changes, just don't update. You can still use most plugins.

Breaking changes and mistakes are orthogonal to changes to defaults and changes for no clear reason. This separates stable software from perpetual “nightly” one. With Vim you can update through a couple major versions before even realizing it. For me it usually happens after system crashes (classic reinstall windows twice a decade) and the vim config and my habits just work with a new vim download.

If neovim thought that something was broken, it was a very valid reason for a quick change. That’s how changes are made and I think most Vimers respect that. It was a proper community fork, almost a textbook example despite the initial buzz. Everyone got what they needed.

But if you refuse to update, it’s a clear signal for ideological mismatch. The usual issue with picking pace, as I see it through years, is that there’s often no clear finish line where you switch to walking again. The pace just stays like that forever and people start to grow tired of changes they were happy about.

Will that kill Neovim? I don’t think so. People who migrated to it (opposed to newcomers) were built for a change too and will probably “survive” all that. Is your method of dealing with it valid? In principle I agree, nothing wrong with that either.

Re: The State of Vim

#170

Post by rand0m4r »

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.

I'm going to try this. I use tmux but the idea of being able to use vim for everything seems nice. If you have tips/suggestions, I'm interested.
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