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Comment by chestervonwinch | Hacker News Reader

I apologize that this question is slightly tangential to the submitted post, but this seems like an ideal venue to ask: Is there a GUI interface to vim that has smooth-scrolling?

I've tried Gvim, but this just seems like vim with buttons (no smooth-scroll). I've tried Sublime text with the ActualVim plugin (powered by NeoVim), but this had errors which somehow swapped document buffers on write, essentially deleting an entire document (thankfully I had a backup).

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Spacemacs [0] :)

http://spacemacs.org/

I haven't used it but there is https://github.com/terryma/vim-smooth-scroll

For GUIs, I tried VimR and MacVim. Neither seems to smooth-scroll. Using the above plugin might work though?

Also, have you tried Vintageous for Sublime Text? I use it and it works well.

Do you mean scrolling with a mouse? It might sound a bit arrogant, but there's rarely any good reason to scroll with a mouse in vim.

I would like to second this, and support you in that I don’t think it is an arrogant sentiment. Many of the efficiency gains vim gives you are the result of being able to navigate anywhere in a document or on a line with a few keystrokes. The mouse is comparatively slower, once the navigation commands are familiar.

I disagree, in only that good mouse support can help ease the transition and in some cases it may simply come down to user preference for some things. I don’t think personally that any text editor should be overly opinionated in how a user interacts with it; too much at least. I do agree that it is mostly more effective to not use a mouse once you know the commands

Perhaps with a mouse, but not necessarily. I don't think your statement re: mouse scrolling applies universally. For programming script documents, sure -- each line is likely limited to the 80 column mark, and so the lines are quite short.

However, with Latex documents, for example, very long lines (i.e., paragraphs) are a big pain for me (even with vimrc options `set display=lastline` and `set linebreak`). In typical GUI text editors, the wrapped lines of long lines are treated as sort of "pseudo lines" themselves. This means when I cursor down (via mouse or keys), the cursor doesn't jump to the next newline after the paragraph (as it does with vim).

Apparently, this last described problem can be addressed [1]. So maybe the solution is that I need to spend more quality time with my vimrc? :)

[1]: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Move_cursor_by_display_lines_when_...

I think they're talking about animating scroll changes. Web browsers do this, if you press page down, it animates the change(it's subtle, the animation only lasts a fraction of a second).

In Vim, it'll just do an instant repaint, so you kind of lose context.

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