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Comment by chestervonwinch | Hacker News Reader

I like this quote:

> Vim is a small language for editing text that ships with a small user interface.

Pardon my ignorance, but are the two separable? Could someone write a GUI interface that uses the vim text editing language underneath? I know of gvim, but this seems to be just vim with a menu bar.

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There are plenty of Vim emulator plugins for "GUI editors" like Atom (or even the Visual Studio family, as a comment in this thread mentions) that do just that!

Sadly, most do it poorly. There's a lot more to Vim than 'hjklia'.

Yes, I've used them in emacs, atom, etc. They're useful, but often feel unnatural. I was looking for something that was built from the ground up specifically as "vim editing with a nice interface" -- maybe this is neovim, as someone else suggested.

Nope, VIM the UX (keys and movement) and VIM the application are not separated at the moment.

It would be great to be able to use VIM key movement as drop-in replacement for any text field OS wide but the VIM interface (the command line) plays an important role in the UI and I don't see how it could be swept aside without losing some VIM core functionality: EG how do you :%s///gi without the overlay command line ?

I actually have a design document from 5 years ago lying around in my backup that outlines a desktop shell based on (and expanding on) vim's UX. I should get back to that project one day.

I think you're looking for neovim.

NeoVim is really a fork though, not a separate implementation.

Yeah, but someone could "write a GUI interface that uses the vim text editing language underneath" using neovim. It's one of its main selling points.

https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Plugin-UI-architecture

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