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Leaving Neovim for Zed

stevedylan.dev

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Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#271
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know. That feels perfectly reasonable for what I imagine is 99% of all developers, so while sad, I can imagine why that use case is not very high on their list of priorities.

> That feels perfectly reasonable for what I imagine is 99% of all developers, so while sad, I can imagine why that use case is not very high on their list of priorities. I think you might be under the impression that what the GP is complaining about is having the default copy and paste go to the system clipboard. This is not what is happening; in Vim all modifications are saved to the default register. Making the de…

I assume all of these are some special combination of keys/modifiers? While I agree it’s less than ideal, at least you always know it’s going to happen if you are sort of familiar with Vim.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#272

There was a time when I was learning how to use Vim and I saw my boss use the mouse to do a simple copy and paste and there was kind of a disconnect between these two ways of using the computer. From my experience a good mouse is better than a power tool like Vim, not for copy/paste, but just because it can reach the whole screen very fast and it works with all software although limited in text terminals. Learning Vi…

That because with Vim (and Emacs) the main tool for navigation is search. Even vim’s text objects are just search related to the cursor. That’s why you want quick file search, quick find in files, and powerful search and replace utilities. The issue with the mouse is that it adds friction between searching and editing. That’s where vim bindings and emacs chords come into play.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#273
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very interesting. Very cool to look at the source and see how simple it is. I may have just answered my own question, but I'm curious why you prefer this over the popular vim or neovim extensions, which have quite good coverage of vim features, and the neovim one even lets you use real neovim plugins because it is powered by a real neovim instance.

I was using the other vim extension for years. I had tried the neovim one as well a few years ago and I ran into so many bugs that I switched back after 1/2 day. I am sure it's better today, but I can see that there is still an open issue with folding, for instance. The thing is that I used to consider headless Neovim to be the ultimate solution to "vim but with IDE conveniences" but I am no longer so sure. Keeping e…

Cool, thanks for the answer. Simplicity and predictability can definitely beat long feature lists.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#274
post #109

For me this feels similar to why I use Helix[1]. I used to use VSCodium and had tried to switch to Vim or Neovim multiple times but didn't manage because of all the plugin configuration to be able to program. Then I saw an HN post about Helix, started it up and it just worked and so haven't used anything else since. I find the Helix keybindings easier to learn because you see what text will be affected by any operati…

Helix has been trying to implement a plugins system for like 2 years that should tell you everything you need to know about its future prospects

I use Helix and don’t miss plugins.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#275
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For remote development there is Fleet from JetBrains which is still in preview but mostly works (year ago it had a lot of issues). Nonetheless, it still needs a lot of improvements (rendering performance IME is poor, some functionality is missing in comparison to full-fledged IDEs like IntelliJ) There is also JetBrains Gateway which allows you to run IntelliJ/PyCharm/etc. remotely. I'm using it and it is very usable,…

> Why are you using VSCode over Vim for remote development? Who's to say you have shell access to the remote instance?

Why don’t you have shell access? That is the minimum for doing any kind of development. And I think the vscode plugin relies on shell access to install itself (either ssh or whatever protocol for docker)

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#276
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Emacs `M-x sql-connect` is much easier for me to do than to look up, in VS Code, what shortcut has been assigned to the extension I use And the knowledge of `M-x sql-connect` came to you how? In a dream? Commands in Emacs are undiscoverable unless you know what to look for. > Each time I want to do something in the IDE I switch focus from the code to the IDE. When in Vim or Emacs, that never happens! No. It happens…

> And the knowledge of `M-x sql-connect` came to you how? In a dream? Commands in Emacs are undiscoverable unless you know what to look for. It's one command that implements autocomplete which gives you access to the entire system. > It happens only because you're used to Emacs and Vim, That's my entire point! I learned the majority of Emacs and Vim commands well back in the mid-90s. > and unused to an IDE. Objective…

> It's one command that implements

And you know this command how? You discovered it how?

> That's my entire point! I learned the majority of Emacs and Vim commands well back in the mid-90s.

Indeed. And now you complain about friction in IDEs because you refuse to learn IDEs to the same extent.

> My point was about little frictions all adding up.

Yes, yes they do. And I find there are significantly more frictions in Emacs and Vim than in a modern IDE. The only reason you don't see them is that you've already learned Emacs/Vim

> It just takes much less memory to remember 4 verbs and maybe 6 nouns in Vim to perform navigation, than learning 4x6=24 shortcuts

Wat. I don't even know what these random numbers mean, and where you got them from. And how we went from functionality and capabilities to navigation.

> I'm just explaining why needing to remember fewer things

Thing is, you don't remember "fewer things" with Emacs/Vim. You end up remembering about the same, or greater number of things on top of significantly worse functionality.

Like you pretend that remembering dozens of various commands to type into `M-x` is somehow easier, and requires less memory than remembering the common shortcuts for common actions and falling back to Cmd+P(VS Code)/Cmd+Shift+A(Intelli J) to look up actions you rarely use.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#277

Echoing similar sentiments that I'm optimistic for Zed to become more polished and stable. Till then, Sublime Text 4 is still the best non-terminal text editor I've ever used and I continue to daily drive it. Sure its paid and non-FOSS, but its incredibly performant on Linux and Windows and its LSP extension + Sublime Merge fill the gap left by VSCode for me. Well worth the price tag IMO.

I love ST4 but I need to do a lot of remote editing - that is, editing a project on a Linux server. VSC is the only tool I’ve used where the remote edit “works” and it also seems to constantly have problems. I’ve tried things like rmate or SSHFS but they don’t work well. Do you have any advice on a ST4 solution for this? Thanks in advance!

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#278

> Every now and then I would update a plugin in Neovim and everything would break, and I would have to spend time fixing it instead of getting work done. This is true, but only if you're not using one of the ready made distributions. I didn't switch to NeoVim until I discovered LazyVim and this amazing guide https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ . That changed everything. I just use LazyVim out of the box, a…

+1 for LazyVim

I got fed up of tweaking my own config and keeping up with the very fast moving plugin ecosystem. Gave LazyVim a try (after using LunarVim for a bit) and it's been a breeze. It's very well polished and maintained by a prominent plugin author.

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#279
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After years of using Vim as a keyboard assassin, then Neovim (with a custom config initially based on kickstart.nvim), about a month ago I started using LazyVim. After test-driving the default config for just a few hours, I found myself nodding my head and saying to myself, "Yes, this is the way." I had seen some of the other "Neovim as IDE" projects but after looking at them carefully, I decided that LazyVim is gene…

I tries LazyVim, but on every startup it nags me about version updates, and :x somehow takes 2-3 seconds extra as well. I don't live in the editor; vim is only useful to me if it starts up and quits instantly.

You can disable the update checker with a very simple config change.[0]

As for :x being slow, I'm not sure what that might be, it certainly isn't the case for me, it quits instantly. Try asking around in their support channels?

[0]: https://www.lazyvim.org/configuration/lazy.nvim (look for "checker" field)

Re: Leaving Neovim for Zed

#280

There is one big issue with terminal editors that I keep running up against: single font size. One notable place where this is an issue is file listings, being able to have smaller proportional fonts makes a huge difference in usability. I have switched to Zed, but it sadly shares more in common with vscode than it does vim. I believe the ideal text editor would bring a small amount of GUI to the general idea of one…

Yeah, it's definitely an issue I'd like to see tackled better. Neovim is already fully working under a client-server architecture, as far as I understand, i.e. the TUI is already "just" a client that connects to the main server process. There are some neovim GUIs such as Goneovim, Neovide, Fvim and even FireNvim (using neovim inside Firefox), but they mostly implement some windowing effects and whatnot, because I belive things are still somewhat tied to a cell based grid. Despite all this, I daily drive neovide.
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