Newsletter #7 - Summer of Road • Hacker News Board

Re: Newsletter #7 - Summer of Road

#31

Post by tommyallen » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 5:11 AM UTC

nilved wrote: post #26

tommyallen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vim didn't eat Neovim's lunch. It made its own lunch. Vim8's async feature is a copy only in name. Comparing both async APIs, I'm almost certain that Vim8's was added spitefully. It's just so obtuse compared to Neovim's.

Well, that one is the one people are using. Now that the question among plugin developers is "Vim or Neovim?" which one do you think they will choose? It's totally possible that Neovim will need to adopt Vim's inferior API for compatibility reasons, like they're doing with the VimL Lua compatibility layer.

The same question can be asked about Vim 7.4 and Vim 8.0. Which should a plugin developer choose to support? I'm a plugin developer and choose to support any version that has the right features for what I'm accomplishing. For most things, there isn't anything special that needs to be done.

Re: Newsletter #7 - Summer of Road

#32

Post by akkartik » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 5:39 AM UTC

nilved wrote: post #18

rrradical wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how it could be 'for worse'? Even Neovim benefits from the uptick in Vim patches, because they actually merge many of them into Neovim. So it seems like it can only be a good thing. Better editors for everyone.

That's one way it could play out, but that's not the way it did play out. Vim ate Neovim's lunch because they took so long to create a release that Vim was able to copy their best features. Worse yet, they did this in a way that is not compatible with Neovim. There is a chasm between Vim and Neovim that is growing, and the incentive to cross it is shrinking. As someone who has watched closely Neovim's development sin…

Vaporware?! That's atrociously uncharitable. Care to defend that characterization? Did you call Gmail vaporware until they took the 'Beta' label out?

Re: Newsletter #7 - Summer of Road

#33

Post by nilved » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 2:05 PM UTC

blueyed wrote: post #29

nilved wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An embedded terminal emulator is exactly what Neovim should not have.

Care to elaborate?

Neovim's goal is remove cruft and shrink the codebase. Adding a terminal emulator, a completely orthogonal feature that makes no sense in a text editor to begin with, is contrary to this goal. They wasted time and worked on the wrong thing.

Re: Newsletter #7 - Summer of Road

#34

Post by tommyallen » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

nilved wrote: post #33

blueyed wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate?

Neovim's goal is remove cruft and shrink the codebase. Adding a terminal emulator, a completely orthogonal feature that makes no sense in a text editor to begin with, is contrary to this goal. They wasted time and worked on the wrong thing.

Vim already allows you to use :shell. Neovim took it a step further with the added benefit that you can treat the output as buffer text. Just because you can't see the advantages this gives developers doesn't mean it was a waste of time.

Re: Newsletter #7 - Summer of Road

#35

Post by brotherjerky » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 3:53 PM UTC

blueyed wrote: post #27

brotherjerky wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, I like: - Neomake ( https://github.com/neomake/neomake ) which I use for async linting. I know this is now working in Vim 8, but I've been using Neovim for a while and this was exclusive for a while. - Vim-test ( https://github.com/janko-m/vim-test ) uses `:term` for running your tests from within vim -- this is most useful because I have a shortcut to test from current editing file, etc. I know this is also…

Thanks for the link to Neomake - Neovim is still a first class citizen for it, and it was a pain to get it working on Vim (and several bugs for Vim have been filed, debugged and fixed in this process).

Thanks for making Neomake!

Re: Newsletter #7 - Summer of Road

#36

Post by nilved » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 7:34 PM UTC

tommyallen wrote: post #34

nilved wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neovim's goal is remove cruft and shrink the codebase. Adding a terminal emulator, a completely orthogonal feature that makes no sense in a text editor to begin with, is contrary to this goal. They wasted time and worked on the wrong thing.

Vim already allows you to use :shell. Neovim took it a step further with the added benefit that you can treat the output as buffer text. Just because you can't see the advantages this gives developers doesn't mean it was a waste of time.

:shell is completely different. That's vim stepping out of the way while you run a subprocess. Moreover, vim having it is not an argument for Neovim to have it. If vim really had a terminal emulator Neovim should have removed it.