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Comment by chc4 | Hacker News Reader

It says it's powered by React and (presumable) Electron - does it have the same kind of issues that Atom does? Can it open big files, how responsive is it, etc.

How do plugins work? Do neovim plugins work out of the box with Oni, do you have to write a wrapper, or are they completely incompatible? This is really the make or break part of it.

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If you're comparing Oni to Atom, the architecture is actually quite different. Oni uses Neovim at the core to manage buffers & buffer manipulation (in other words, a native layer vs JavaScript in Atom) - this is a major benefit when working with large files. In addition, Oni uses a canvas renderer for the editor surface vs the DOM used by Atom. Together, these significantly improve the responsiveness of the tool. Architecturally, Oni is more similiar to the Xray project being investigated by the GitHub team: https://github.com/atom/xray.

Most neovim plugins work great with Oni :) Just set the `oni.loadInitVim` configuration value to `true`: https://github.com/onivim/oni/wiki/Configuration#oni

> Can it open big files

Yes it should be able to do that. Neovim runs separately from frontends like the one in the OP.

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

By default it doesn't load your init.vim, but if you change that flag in the config it will behave exactly like your regular neovim install (since that is in fact exactly what it is: a very light canvas renderer wrapped around neovim). I have been using it for a couple of weeks with all of my vim plugins with no issues (ctrl-p, buffer gator, easy motion, etc).

Edit: it's worth pointing out that while the rendering is done with electron/canvas, everything else is delegated to neovim. I haven't noticed any slowdown with 1000+ line files, but if you're talking tens of thousands... maybe.

I don't have any problem with 1000 line files in Atom either. It sucks at 100,000 line files, but I only ever open them in an editor by accident (Atom gives a warning). That is what grep and tail are for

The latency and memory usage is arguably far worse than Atom but that would be expected given its infantile state.

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