I am done with vim

I wont be using vim 9. it is dead too me. NeoVim forever.

In the last 3 weeks went full lua. I have finally committed to Neovim.

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#vim #programming #softwareengineering

[PhillipDressen]

Thank you Wifeagen! Your sponsorship is invaluable to the community!
Prime, between you and TJ I was just giving Neovim a try. It was time to learn why sitting on trees looking through telescopes is so appealing... Now knowing 9 breaks backwards compatibility: I might as well try the lua config too. Thanks!

[kuglepen]

Okay, so can we please have a guide to what would be a contemporary Neovim config. No old cruft, all the newest stuff. What does the killer config look like?

[tobiasjennerjahn]

I think overall it’s a pretty sensible decision. Vim has always been Bram’s Project and he decided that it’s going to stay that way.
It’s unfortunate that this will split the vim community even more, but at least now it’s easy to choose. People who like the community driven development and velocity will choose neovim and people who like brams version will choose vim. I think that’s fine. No more “which is better”, they’re just different editors now.

[dredre]

Agreed, weird choice to make. Also, as a user, I can motivate myself to learn Lua since it has the benefit of being used outside of vim as well. With vimscript, I never learned it and mostly copied things over since the syntax never made sense to me.

Also thanks to the wife!

[nomathic]

Thanks prime's wife for allowing him to reach his final form 🙏

[lucabaggi]

looking forward to a full nvim config series! totally agree on this one

[AbhinavKulshreshtha]

I moved from vim to neovim for LSP. When I tried lua, it was just amazing. Specifically the trick where I could just create a hash table of properties and loop through them to set them, It's just so clean.

[totally_not_a_bot]

I don't really configure Vim other than setting various options. I'm not a professional developer so I don't feel like I need to, and I like simplicity. I'm trying Neovim because I like the defaults and the autoindentation is better. I also like how the configs are structured using the XDG config and data directories. I'm not sure I would install it if I had to build a system from scratch again. I tend to use custom distros with fairly minimal setups and configuration. If I can change a line in a default config, I will change a line in a default config.

I use vim because I think it's simpler than emacs and I like ESC:w better then C-x C-s as I don't like pressing ctrl if I can help it. I can't be bothered to figure out how to enable evil mode since I'm lazy with my configs and I'm kinda stuck in my ways at this point. Vim is good enough. The emacs learning curve is also super intense. Basic Vim takes less than an hour using vimtutor.

Vim also integrates with the system clipboard better. I had to install and learn a seperate package to use Neovim's clipboard functionality. That package _can_ be used with Vim, but it isn't mandatory.

Hardcore users are going to be affected. Relatively normal users like me are going to be largely unaffected.

Programming languages and other systems break backwards compatibility all the time. People who like Vim will adapt. People who don't like the change will migrate. It happened with Python 3, and look how that went. People learned the different syntax and moved on. People don't usually like jumping ship to other software ecosystems anyway.

Neovim is a fork of Vim and doesn't include the Vim license as is specified as mandatory in the Vim license. Vim is charityware, and I like that Bram has that focus. You can support Vim if you want, but he requests that you support children in Uganda instead and even includes donation links, paypal addresses and relevant bank information to make it easy. This information is in the first section of the help docs.

[MohitDodhia]

You forever have my gratitude, Mrs. Prime

[freshhorizonswithjakub]

Thank you Prime's wife for allowing us to have such delightful experience and joy with your husband!

[marcelor]

Special thanks to your wife (and kid(s) ?) for sponsorhip each episode, as a entrepeneur with wife and 2 kids I know that these special extra times that lead us towards a better future.

[Beornz]

Thanks, Mrs. ThePrimeagen. I hope to see more videos here. It's hard to catch the live stream but love VODs. Keep it up!

[TomJordan]

One aspect of why I like Lua being used in Neovim, is that I can use Lua in other tools like — Hammerspoon, WezTerm, etc

[Satook]

Agreed. Just use one of the many available options.

I’d love to see WASM take hold. Much safer getting scripts from the net when they’re sandboxed!

[mattwilliams]

Was super stoked on the decision for Lua, now I can re-purpose the learning of the language to awesome window manager, or one of the many cool open source Lua driven game engines.

[segueoyuri]

fun fact: not every single article of software ever produced needs an update

[winstonstrongarm]

I've only recently come to agree with this mentality on big changes, DIY is not always the best choice, especially when it comes to deciding whether to implement your own standards over adopting something new/different.

[luissolanodev]

Of course I didn't trust the title, c'mon… who thinks ThePrime is gonna leave this fabulous text editor..? No way

[TomJordan]

Good short-take video.


My focus has been in the perception of startup speed. For example, I want the power of a note system — like Neorg — without paying the cost in time to first edit when I'm not focused on capturing a note — and Neorg has a high startup cost.

So the techniques of loading only what you want — when you want it — is interesting to me. So I am currently refactoring my config with this focus in mind.

I have been pulling ideas from a variety of configs all along but now think I'm almost to the point of seeing if I should split it off for others to peruse.

When you do redo your Lua config videos, consider emphasizing why you are doing it this way instead of another way — I think the why a programmer used this technique instead of that technique is interesting and under represented in config videos tutorials.

[raptoress]

Thanks. I had no idea this was going on, and I don't know how to feel about it. I just had to ditch Atom, I'm still trying to get used to Vim and now this.