Newsletter #4 – Thanksvimming Day | Hacker News Reader

Newsletter #4 – Thanksvimming Day

neovim.org

197 pointsSpiritus39 comments

My only concern about this is that people are deprecating Vim stuff in favor of NeoVim. My experience with NeoVim is that it's not ready to replace Vim yet - I'm optimistic about NeoVim, but it's too early to start deprecating Vim stuff.

> My experience with NeoVim is that it's not ready to replace Vim yet

And when did you last try Neovim? Because I use it everyday with all of my plugins from vim with 0 problems. The new remote plugin system with python support is making huge strides. People have already started on Go support and I imagine JavaScript, lua, etc is not far behind. It's a very exciting time. I recently even got a commit merged, it's a great community and I've plastered my Macbook with Neovim stickers. :P

Thanks for this, i had no idea it was even possible to use NeoVim yet! Think i'll spend some time this holiday setting it up, appreciated!

>Think i'll spend some time this holiday setting it up, appreciated!

That's not needed. With the default config or a simple vimrc it's a drop-in replacement. Some extensions don't work yet (even Syntastic) but that should be resolved soon.

So you don't recommend starting fresh?

Do keep in mind that my experience is really limited: I compiled neovim and it works fine with my .vimrc & all extensions. So there's no reason to start fresh.

However there's no difference so far: Syntastic checks are still synchronous, and I should spend some time to research alternatives (e.g. http://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/2m1w3k/neomake_an_as...)

I have no problems running Syntastic. What are you running in to?

That was months ago actually. I just retried and it works perfectly, but it's still synchronous and blocks the UI. This is what I expect from neovim: provide me with async lint/checks.

The only ongoing works on the problem I've seen are https://github.com/scrooloose/syntastic/issues/1253 and https://github.com/benekastah/neomake, which I've not tried yet.

> This is what I expect from neovim: provide me with async lint/checks.

It would have to be written using the new remote-plugin architecture I'd think. Plugins that were written for Vim would always be synchronous.

Not necessarily. The original patch Tarruda tried to get merged into Vim provided asynchronous commands in pure Vimscript (through a new kind of event for autocmd).

I would guess this feature is already in NeoVim.

There's a new plugin called neomake[1] which was written from scratch to take advantage of the Neovim async api. It's a young project though.

[1] https://github.com/benekastah/neomake

The last time I tried it was about two months ago. I'll have to give it another go, thanks!

The problem with this is, unless you are a plugin author these things aren't compelling reasons to switch. Maybe they'll enable new types of plugins not possible before, but until that happens I don't feel a reason to use neovim.

Floobits has had a bit of history with unsuccessfully merging an async patch into vim to make their plugin work without breaking leader keys, so this one case isn't too surprising

Awesome! I hope they keep this is, it's one of the most professional write ups I've ever seen an Open Source project so - especially a new one.

I also love that they're posting bugs to vim-dev so that they can be fixed in Vim as well.

Regarding the bit about Floobits, it's very nice of them to mention us, we love Neovim, and all of the things said are true, but the Neovim remote plugin API recently changed and we're rushing to get our plugin to be compatible. They were nice enough to let us know in our own issue tracker so we're nearly there. Our current plugin only works with versions of Neovim prior to the remote plugin change from before last week. Note this is the new remote plugin system, not the regular python plugins that have not changed and so vim plugins have no issues.

I've been immensely pleased by the professionalism and high-sense of collaboration on this project. I think ego has been kept out of the gates of Neovim. Happy Thanksvimming!

I actually can't get it to build on Fedora 20, at least easily. Not to mention the things I had to figure out to get LinuxBrew working at all. Neovim is not "drop in ready" until it's easy to lay hands on, which basically means packaging for distros.

What errors did you get?

Something about libuv or some lua library for libuv not wanting to build. That was after I had to do arcane things to get linuxbrew to recognize my distro's gcc, apparently it's expected to be in /usr/bin/gcc-4.X and Fedora puts it in /usr/bin/gcc.

I've been a vim user for a while now, recently started my move over to emacs (evil mode is not bad at all), mostly influenced by the Clojure community.

What does neovim do for a not so hardcore user like me who's happy with the current state of affairs? Or in other words, what am I not doing right with vim that I fail to see what neovim offers, apart from a modern code base and may be a better way of writing plugins?

I would say an easier way to create plugins is a pretty big advantage. For some reason I've always been deterred from writing vim plugins, and like you I started using Emacs a few months ago (mostly for the haskell packages), and I feel so much more comfortable writing and editing my own extensions. I've never really looked into neovim, but they're plugin architecture looks really nice so I'll have to check it out.

Nice! did some digging: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Plugin-UI-architecture

That's actually pretty nice, was wondering if there are real tools/apps/interfaces out there which are using this as just a POC or a demo.

This is also interesting btw: https://github.com/neovim/python-client will definitely give that a try!

Some plugins that target neovim:

- Floobits: https://github.com/Floobits/floobits-neovim

- Neomake: https://github.com/benekastah/neomake

I recently added neovim support to vim-pandoc. These[1] two lines replaced [2] and [3]. It's quite the improvement.

[1]: https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc/blob/master/pythonx...

[2]: https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc/blob/master/pythonx...

[3]: https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc/blob/master/pythonx...

Nice!

For me the biggest advantage will be the support for embedding in other programs, so we can do away with the proliferation of imperfect vim emulators.

Is this an official project -- will this be the new vim? Or is this a parallel, forked project?

NeoVim is an independent, parallel fork started by vim contributor Thiago de Arruda Padilha. The original fundraising page has some more background:

https://www.bountysource.com/teams/neovim/fundraiser

Is there a usable GUI version of NeoVim yet? (e.g. like MacVim)?

Not at the moment that fully utilize Neovim's possibilities. There are some proofs of concepts/rough projects though: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects#gui-p...

I'm a Windows user, and even I'm not able to use Neovim yet, I'll try to contribute. If you are an experienced developer or inexperienced but wanting to learn, visit the GitHub repo and check out the readme, contribute guide, and finally the Wiki to learn more.

It's great to know neovim development is going strong and there are a lot of contributors making good progress.

I've switched to neovim about a month ago. The installation on OSX is smooth. It's fully functional and all the plugins are working.

Has anyone written a tutorial for making a Python plugin for NeoVim?

It took me a few seconds to realise that "issue" in the title didn't mean "bug report", despite all the other occurrences of it in the article that do.

Same. "Neovim Newsletter #4: Thanksvimming Day" would be a better title.

That was the originally submitted title by Spiritus until a HN mod changed it due to inane policy that the title of the submission must match the title of the webpage.

> due to inane policy that the title of the submission must match the title of the webpage.

Not inane, it prevents editorializing, You know the stuff like "Democrats plan to kill more babies" when the Title is "Democrats propose adding more birth control methods".

It was inane in this case which is what I meant as it just addd a few quantifiers for more context. I totally agree with preventing editorializing though so thanks for pointing that out.

The policy prevents submitter editorializing. It's a good blanket policy, but I think this should be one of the exceptions.

Edit: Now the article has the title "Newsletter #4 - Thanksvimming Day". MODS, ASSEMBLE!!

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