Vim 8.0 released (opens in new tab)

Just to add to this, a couple years ago I was able to run a campaign to raise $5000 for Vim via Hacker Newsletter (http://hackernewsletter.com) all thanks to 38k great subscribers and sponsors. So while not officially via HN, it was unofficially. :)

We currently hold the top spot, although I would be happy to see someone surpass that: http://www.vim.org/sponsor/hall_of_honour.php

> There's no replacement for vim.

I'm used to seeing people say "vim" where "vi" is meant (of which vim is but one (much enhanced) clone), so when you say you could switch out gcc for clang, or bash for zsh, could you not switch out vim for (e.g.) nvi[0]? If not, why not?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvi

I found that Emacs + Evil is a pretty good replacement for Vim. Nowadays there is also NeoVim.

Re: eclipse. Rather than the bridge you might want to give vrapper (http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/home/) a try. I find it to be quite acceptable - much better than having no vim keybindings. It's very comparable to the jetbrain's vim plugin.

JetBrain's Vim plugin is very high quality.

I came into Vim pretty happy with my other tools (a very-enhanced Sublime Text 3 and JetBrains IDEs)...I wasn't trying to learn Vim, I just had to. Vim is now basically my one tool. That and tmux...and more of the stuff I was using tmux's features for I'm doing in Vim. Both tools are definitely irreplaceable for me at this point, but vim much more than the other.

> I will never abandon (unless I'm doing Java, because... fuck Java outside of Eclipse or IntelliJ; and yes, I've tried using that one vim<->eclipse bridge, hell no)

If you're referring to eclim [0] FWIW I've found it to be an adequate way to have a vim centric workflow with a few excursions into eclipse. If you have proficiency with both tools and enjoy having an eclim server running in a eclipse window you'd get have access to the best features of both tools.

[0] http://eclim.org/

I'm still trying to use vim with java =P Someday I will be happy

> Given Vim powers our industry

I hope that you're being sarcastic.

So you see the comfort of using IDE (eclipse or intellij) with languages such as Java. Do you feel a similar comfort in vim? with which languages?

Nano

> Neovim was largely responsible for pushing vim

Did Bram Moolenaar tell you that? Otherwise, none of us know what motivated him.

Neovim fans seem to hijack Vim discussions frequently. Sometimes people want to talk about Vim.

I agree with the general point, and I believe it's well-established, that aid can have second-order and higher order effects that are counter-productive. On the other hand, in this case it's merely FUD and an argument for inaction; we would need specific information about Moolenaar's charity. I'm not going to stand still and do nothing just in case.

Second-order effects also can make donations to the Free Software Conservancy counter-productive.

As an aside, I wonder if the Free Software Conservancy would want to be seen telling people not to donate to Ugandan AIDS victims and to redirect the money to themselves. My guess is they would not like to see their name here.

> emotional appeal

Life and death has appeal beyond 'mere' emotion. It's more important than free software, and I say that as an avid fan of, and occasional donor and contributor to FOSS projects.

EDIT: A rewording or two

I don't even...

I am happy that at least one person got what I was meaning :)

Soon NeoVim will no longer update regularly because Vim has caught up and/or surpassed it with every feature that matters...

By that time Emacs will have replaced temacs with Guile and someone clever will have added VimScript as a hosted language.

That is tmux's job. Do one thing well.

That feels like the realm of a plugin, IMO. (I don't know enough to know whether or not that type of thing could be done via plugin, though.)

Vim was in a virtual lock down of maintenance mode before Neovim came along and offered some competition. I'm happy to see Vim woken up out of its slumber, but let us not dismiss what Neovim offers or has already accomplished.

I think neovim just offered us VIM 8.0.

'transform Vim into an embeddable text editor engine'

I think that was the main objective of the project. Would be nice to real vim in IntelliJ idea.

Neovim is still a lot faster for me. A simple example is always commenting out a block <C-v>10jI#, which takes 5 seconds or so in vim (including 8.0), but is instant in neovim.

I believe it has a complete embedded terminal

having lua as the native scripting language is pretty big too

I'm using it every day for a couple of months now, never crashed and loads faster than Vim 7.

Anyway, the things I appreciate more are the fast evolution and the community, no more than one year ago I tried it but was too lazy to compile, wait, configure...

This time I ran homebrew, linked my .vimrc in ~/.config/nvim/init.vim, and forgot I was using Neovim instead of Vim, except for the async compiling/linting.

I switched more than a year ago and have never had stability problems; it's been only performance and feature enhancements for me. The most obvious was that saving my files no longer locked up the interface for a couple seconds while linters ran (thank you async). More subtly, I had to go on a plugin diet initially that slimmed my features down to what I actually used regularly; since then, I judge the quality of plugins to be improved because they're either new plugins by authors excited to code for neovim, or they're current plugins that got a decent overhaul to work with both.

From what I understand, the plugin community is generally pretty happy with neovim and find it preferable.

Not the parent but FWIW I've been using neovim for +6 months now and it's fantastic. I'm super impressed at the pace of progress and responsiveness of the team.

I've since switched all my plugins to use async versions and it's sooo fast, didn't think vim could be faster but here we are.

I've been using neovim for almost a year now, and have contributed some (small) code fixes and also donate to the project. It works great for me, and I completely forget that I'm using neovim (until I use :terminal). Also, from what I hear, contributing to Vim is much harder than NeoVim so I'm more inclined to contribute to a project which has a healthy community of contributors.

I am stuck at 0.1.3 as I am unable to brew install any of the newer versions. (It craps out on some LuaJIT stuff and I haven't really had time to fight with it) Aside from having to mess with it to get CTRL-h working, it's been pretty smooth. I LOVED vimplug (the package manager) with its async installs. I have high hopes for NeoVim's future... even if that future turns out to be just giving Vim a kick in the pants to move forward.

Really great! It was honestly a relatively painless transition for me.

There is such support in Spacemacs, it is called "spacemacs layouts" but the tab is visible only on demand while pressing `SPC l`. Eyebrowse is also integrated in Spacemacs layouts so you can have multiple sub-layouts for a given layouts. Note that Spacemacs layouts also achieve buffer isolation so you can have a layout restricted to project's buffers only, you can also create your own rules to automatically add buffers to some layouts (called custom layouts). Last you can persist Spacemacs layouts across sessions.

There is vim-like tabs implementation for evil users: https://github.com/krisajenkins/evil-tabs .

I personally use emacs-native way, window-configuration-to-register: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WindowsAndRegisters

> And macros, now and then, act up. As in, they won't record properly or something.

What you may be experiencing is an erroneous action stopping the macro. For example, if you press h at the beginning of the line, macro recording would be stopped. To make this behaviour less annoying add: (setq evil-kbd-macro-suppress-motion-error t) .

Sublime-like multi-cursors in emacs are sometimes more useful than macros. I use and like https://github.com/gabesoft/evil-mc .

Regarding other points:

  - yes, for huuuge files I still use vim
  - Occasional bugs due happen, as in every editor running custom plugins. In emacs debugging and editing plugins code is natural. You can use emacs to debug itself and reload parts of code without restarting.

> On large Rust files, things grind to a halt if I run a macro on every line

I actually started testing Spacemacs ad Vim was getting slow when highliting big .rs files.

I couldn't deal with Vintageous or Vintage. The lack of a proper ex-line for me kills it, along with spotty support for certain visual-mode movements. The rough edges are right at the forefront all the time when I try.

I love Vim keybindings - but for me they don't "work" outside Vim. I just keep using Vim's and Cua keybindings mixed together...

For me yanking with `y` copies to my system clipboard. I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with evil; I think it's an emacs setting. Perhaps one of these?

    (setq select-enable-clipboard t)
    (setq select-enable-primary t)

See https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Cl...

You should try profiling to see if anything comes out as taking up a lot of resources. `M-x profiler-start`, do some work or type some stuff (if you notice that it's slow), then do `M-x profiler-report` to see if anything in particular is slowing things down. Note though that the part where you type `M-x profiler-report` may sometimes show up in the profiler so ignore that.

See https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Pr...

It's true that emacs can get pretty slow if you have so many things running that you don't even need. It's also useful to defer packages until you actually need them by using autoloads or if you use use-package, `:defer/:commands/:bind` which create them for you.

Core Emacs is extremely snappy, slowdowns generally occur from packages. Helm is indeed a giant monster. Highlighting and redisplay is another area where things slow down.

I run on an eight year old Thinkpad. I run my own config now, but used Spacemacs for quite some time. I've never had problems with speed. I didn't use it with Elixir though.

Perhaps try disabling your layers one at a time to see where the problem is.

speed is the main reason i'm not using spacemacs, it has problems just rendering it's own default config file when navigating around it (granted i'm stuck on windows at work which is far from optimal).

What did Neovim do for VIM? Vim was saying all these things were in the workds way before Neovim.

Might see in my tone I am not a fan of this fork.

I just dove in about six months ago, and now I feel v productive in Spacemacs. The Spacemacs ABC videos are helpful.

Three of Spacemac's four pillars (mnemonic, discoverable, consistent) make it relatively easy to get the hang of. My early usage looked something like:

- Think of task I want to accomplish that probably has key binding

- Begin typing SPC - <continue drilling down through menus that look promising>

- If that doesn't work, type SPC-: and begin typing what I think the command might be called

- If that doesn't work, search web for "Spacemacs key binding <thing I want to do>"

- If that doesn't work, find/read relevant Spacemacs layer documentation

- If that doesn't work, ask in the Spacemacs gitter channel

- Memorize key binding

Once I learned a binding I found it easy to remember due to the mnemonicness:

open this file in Github? SPC-g-h-o of course (g (git) - h (..hub) - (open))

view most recent search buffer? SPC-s-l (s (search) - l (last search buffer))

maximize this window's buffer? SPC-w-m, etc

I have dabbled in spacemacs a tiny bit and I have been using vim for years. Basically I think there are two ways to learn spacemacs.

Method 1

1. Become proficient in vim

2. Become proficient in emacs

3. Learn spacemacs keyboard shortcuts

Method 2

1. Become proficient in emacs

2. Become proficient in vim

3. Learn spacemacs keyboard shortcuts

I'm a vim user, but I know almost nothing about emacs, so I am having a tough time adopting spacemacs. The basic editing features are a flawless reproduction of vim, but when I do `set textwidth=99` it doesn't work. Then I end up googling how to do this in spacemacs which is apparently `spc : set-fill-column <enter> 99`. This is just one example, but there are many others if you try to do anything different from the spacemacs defaults.

The documentation is very good. I recommend downloading and installing it and just playing around. Just press the spacebar and you'll see an organized, easily discoverable command interface pop up. Magit is very straightforward if you know how to use the git commandline. Type SPC g s (SPC git status) to open the magit on the current file, then ? to view the available commands. Although org-mode is a massive beast, it can still be productive to simply start by learning small parts and increase the set of features you use over time.

The whole thing should be fun, not just laborious.

http://spacemacs.org/ http://spacemacs.org/doc/QUICK_START.html

Besides the great documentation, watching "Spacemacs ABC" helped a lot: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrJ2YN5y27KLhd3yNs2dR...

If anyone is curious, here is the thread in question where the vim async API was proposed and the neovim devs proposed collaboration and were shut down without actually looking at the details:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/_SbMTGshzVc/...

Some choice posts:

- Bram (vim author's) response to whether he looked at existing implementation in neovim: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/vim_dev/_SbMTGshzVc/wXmJuL4P...

- Thiago (neovim author's) response to Bram, which was ignored: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/vim_dev/_SbMTGshzVc/XZEXxaxD...

There are lots of other instances of this exact interaction between neovim and vim over and over, it's infuriating. Neovim was started precisely for this reason, an async proposal was made (in 2014!!) which was rudely shut down and all efforts of collaboration were ignored.

This is what is now possible with Neovim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5azVeDUDo

This is misleading. Bram takes commit ownership of external contributors. Compare it to Neovim, which feels much more like a community: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/graphs/contributors

I wouldn't say he's stepped up. It's all a reactionary response to Neovim. I dont think we'd ever have async in vim if it weren't for the neovim project.

That being said I hope they pull an io.js and merge taking the best of both vim and neovim, whatever that may be.

Right. Frankly that's a disappointing response. One source software shouldn't be a competition. I'm still holding out for some kind of grand unification in the future. I'm sure this is becoming a nightmare for plug-in maintainers, because it's certainly a pain in the ass for users like me.

Me, I wrote my own OS.

Every real Jedi needs to build their own light saber, and come on, it's just 100KLOC or so.

Link a repo, I'd love to check it out.

I've never even considered what goes into making an editor.

ah! amazing, can i try it ?

I apologize if this is not the right place to ask but how would I go about adding the following vim/nvim functionality to .visrc.lua ?

inoremap jk <Esc> inoremap kj <Esc>

This is a great project, I'm keeping a really close eye on it, but still missing the few plugins I use in vim/neovim.

vis looks really interesting. i keep meaning to make the time to try it out properly

  cd /usr/local/Cellar/vim/HEAD/share/vim/vim80/compiler; chmod   644 *.vim README.txt
  -bash: cd: /usr/local/Cellar/vim/HEAD/share/vim/vim80/compiler: No such file or directory
  chmod: *.vim: No such file or directory
  chmod: README.txt: No such file or directory

Eh..I'll probably wait a little bit longer.

or update

$ brew update && brew upgrade vim --HEAD

Former OSX user here: Another vote for using vim out of brew. Brew + iterm2 was the only thing that kept me on OSX for so long due to just how inane OSX is as a unix environment.

I've since put Windows 10 on my MBPr (performs so much goddamned faster, Ivy Bridge era /w Intel GPU only, 8gb of RAM, decentish SSD for that generation), and use msys2 to fill that gap.

Disclaimer: My company Exelion hosts the msys2 mirror because their project is so important to the Windows community, and Sourceforge was having serious issues at the time. Well worth spending a dedi on them to keep the project going, imo.

Have you tried tmux + neovim yet though? It's way faster and smoother in just about every aspect I can think of. Strongly recommend it.

Both. The nvim GUI is fluid and beautiful.

Looks like their server is over quota. Here's the cached version -- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DsKW591...

That page is now unavailable :)

Maybe https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/v8.0.0002/runtime/doc/versio... ?

Maybe not the best idea, the new link now shows:

> Over Quota

> This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.

> At some point you have drop out of the pseudo Vim world do things the Emacs way, keybindings and all.

or many packages there are many "vim-optimized" packages nowadays, e.g. evil-ediff, evil-org or evil-magit.

> e.g. I like to use C-h as an alternative to backspace, it helps relieves my RSA not have to reach for backspace.

I would do such remapping on the system level. E.g. I personally have my layout implemented in C++ on system level: https://github.com/kozikow/keyremaplinux

> I found loads of other things like that where I just want it to work the Vim way.

In Emacs in general it's easier to customise to do things your way. After a bit investment into learning elisp you can make it work however you want, including vim way. vim is not as customisable.

That's certainly a way of thinking about things.

I guess what I really want is for Vim to decide what it wants to be. You can be simple, or you can be extensible. Vim is kind of trying to be both. Traditionally, Emacs did extensible, and Vi did simple. It's fine if Vim wants to go the emacs route, it's just that I'd rather it stopped doing it so badly: At this point, Vim's extensibility story is embarrassing. It's 2016, the built-in language is rubbish, the external language interfaces are second-class at best. This has to change if Vim really wants to go in that direction. And if doesn't, why bother pretending?

I was observing that with this new update, VIM is increasingly becoming an inferior Emacs. I argue that it should either die, because Emacs does what it's trying to do better, or distinguish itself in the editor space, like other Vi clones, by emphasizing simplicity over extreme flexibility.