Neovim: Rewriting & Modernizing The Vim Editor

[bpetty]

Not impressed

advertises itself as "vim's rebirth for the 21st century", a more modern version of the incredibly popular vim editor...

It is ironic that they are rewriting vim "for the 21st century" in C. I looked over their new code, not seeing the old vim code, and I wasn't really impressed. The old vim code must have been horrible.

[cjcox]

Rename it...

Call it "be" please! Lest there be no joy....

[Fresh_meat]

Let's hope that won't end up the same way as yzis did.

[Nuc!eoN]

I've been using vim for the past 20 years, because I don't know how to turn it off

Haha, man thanks for registering at phoronix, just to say this

[Skrapion]

I use Vim daily, but I really wish it had a setting that switched it to use ECMAScript regular expressions. I have the same issue with Visual Studio. It takes long enough to get proficient at standardized regular expressions; I'm pretty much never going to become proficient at a single-tool variant.

I'm not a huge fan of Vimscript either, for the same reason. Any standardized scripting language -- Lua, Python, JavaScript -- would be preferable.

[wizard69]

When working with bigger projects, I use a full-blown IDE such as IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse.

For small projects, I mostly just use gedit.

If I work over ssh in a terminal, I use nano.

I never really got used to using vim or emacs, they just seem confusing and complicated.

Well EMACS certainly is confusing and overly complicated. However you did say that you use Eclipse.

Side note: for a long time I'm was an Eclipse user. Eclipse however has stuck it to me so many times I'm now very frustrated with it to the degree that I consider it a new rendition of EMACS. Examples here include deleting work spaces, loosing everything related to updates, sluggish behavior even after they seemed to get that under control and other issues that are just frustrating.

I don't see why I should use them.

I tend to agree, they are really hold overs from a bygone era.

[Skrapion]

I tend to agree, they are really hold overs from a bygone era.

The apps, or the users?

I can't really argue with you. I use Vim because I'm used to it. I can't really make a very good argument for it on its own merits.

People try to argue that it's more efficient, but when you compare "delete word", which would be "d, w" in Vim or "Shift+Ctrl+Right, del" in other editors, or "go to line 255", which would be "255 g" in Vim or "Ctrl+g 255 Enter" in other editors, the efficiency edge is slight at best. And in other editors, you can discover functionality by browsing the menu; in Vim, you have to read through the manual to discover functionality.

[DeeK]

I never really got used to using vim or emacs, they just seem confusing and complicated.
I don't see why I should use them.

Agree about emacs. Vim, though, or more specifically "vi", has the advantage that it's the standard text editor on just about every unix system or distribution you'll ever encounter.

There are things you can do in vim that you can't do in eclipse/gedit/nano. Some very very handy things. It is tricky to use initially, but once you get used to it, you'll wonder what you did without it. The amount of times I've reformatted text data with vim, in seconds, that would have taken a person hours or days to do with most other editors ... let's just say it's been quite a time saver.

[Skrapion]

There are things you can do in vim that you can't do in eclipse/gedit/nano. Some very very handy things. It is tricky to use initially, but once you get used to it, you'll wonder what you did without it. The amount of times I've reformatted text data with vim, in seconds, that would have taken a person hours or days to do with most other editors ... let's just say it's been quite a time saver.

As a regular Vim user, I'm not so convinced. Certainly I'm more efficient in Vim, but that's because I have a lot of experience with it. Most of the fast reformatting I'm able to do with Vim comes down to plain old regular expression substitutions or deleting matching/non-matching lines. There's certainly other editors with regular expression parsers. In fact, sometimes I'm less efficient with Vim because instead of using standard regexps, it has its own variant. For instance, for non-greedy matches (*? in typical regular expressions) Vim uses \{-\} (I think - I'm not 100% sure about the escapes, or if you need an asterisk as well). This is stuff I have to constantly look up, because they don't follow standardized regexps, and it slows me down.

One Vim-specific ability I've used is putting match-counts in my substitutions (for instance, to add a line number to the start of each line, or compose a custom ID for matching XML tags) but I certainly don't remember how to do that off the top of my head, and it should be a relatively simple regular expression extension that other editors could implement.

Another useful ability is the period key, which will repeat the last command, so I can enter a command to fix the current line, arrow down to the next spot of interest, and press . to repeat. But other tools would just do that by recording a macro.

Certainly Vim is a fantastic tool for reformatting text once you're proficient at it, but I'd be surprised if there weren't other tools nowadays where you can be just as efficient, and with less effort required to learn it.

[gilboa]

[OLD_GEEK_ALERT]
I've switched to Linux (both @home and @work) back at ~2000(ish).
Mind you, being a Windows C developer, I was used to MSVC (6, the last [normal] version before they switched focus to .NET).
I first tried gedit and kate, but both didn't come close to MSVC.
kdevelop did show promise, but at the time it was pretty unstable (I think it was the first release).
anjuta was also interesting, but it was too, far too unstable.
Tried EMACS, but got lost in the Ctrl-X-X-Y-Z-V-V combos.
Than a friend suggested vi(m), didn't like it at first, but given the lack of a better alternative, I, err, got used to it.

Fast forward 14 years, and I more or less use vim to write everything (including this post).
I even use firefox in vimperator mode...
I do look at alternatives from time to time and there are certainly, very interesting alternatives (kdevelop has improved tremendously, Sublime [although proprietary] looks impressive, etc), but all in all, I also go back to vim + cscope + large_list_of_scripts.
One of the most interesting things about vim is that even though I've been using it since the dark ages, I still learn new tricks once in a while that make me appreciate it even more.
[/OLD_GEEK_ALERT]

Having said that, vim does need some re-factoring. E.g.:
The existing scripting language should be slowly phased out in favour of something mainstream (Python?), the GTK front-end is showing its age and in need of refreshing, etc.

Never the less, My gut feeling tells me that neovim will fail - but hopefully I'm wrong.

- Gilboa