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Comment by auxym | Hacker News Reader

I have not tried this one yet, but what I'd like to see in a nvim gui:

- Splits I can drag around to move and resize with a mouse

- "Native" window tabs instead of terminal-style tabs

- A gvim-style menu bar with some operations for which I can't be bothered to remember the key combination.

So, overall, mostly mouse support and better discoverability. I've tried a few though and haven't really found what I'm looking for, open to suggestions :)

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> Splits I can drag around to move and resize with a mouse

You can already use the mouse to resize splits in neovim, :set mouse+=a

> "Native" window tabs instead of terminal-style tabs

Which features would "native" tabs provide that aren't already available?

> A gvim-style menu bar with some operations for which I can't be bothered to remember the key combination.

Which operations would you put under the menu?

I want native style tabs and line numbers. By native style, I mean both of them in some way separate from the main code window. When I have line numbers enabled in nvim and if I select code using mouse to copy, line numbers get selected automatically and only way to get what I want is to use visual mode or turn off numbers. Its a bit slower than selecting with mouse for me

There are lots of great ways to handle this in vim.

You can sync your system clipboard with vim, for example. This also works well with clipboard history apps like Alfred or CopyQ.

Also, :set mouse+=a solves the line number selection issue.

> Which features would "native" tabs provide that aren't already available?

In ideal world: reordering, tearing off and merging.

> Which operations would you put under the menu?

Ostensibly, all of them?

> In ideal world: reordering, tearing off and merging.

That's an interesting idea. It sounds like it should be technically possible in the terminal too.

Same would go with drag copying text.

"tearing off" to me means creating a new window -- I don't know any terminal which lets you down a new window (although terminal lovers wouldn't want that I imagine).

You can have tabs in vim instead of the terminal. Check :tabedit for example.

Yes that's the idea. Tearing off a tab in vim and creating a new terminal window with an instance of vim having contents of that tab. This is possible in vim guis but afaik not in any terminal version.

When I'm using an IDE (vim-based or otherwise), I tend to have other things integrated into the editor session, for example I'm connected to a REPL or other external thing. If I pop a tab out into a new window, I don't want it to be an entirely separate editor session: I want it to keep all these extra integrated things as the parent. I still want to be able to evaluate code in the same REPL session as the parent without having to create a new session or connection.

I'm not sure how to handle something like this in a terminal editor, unless the vim plugins are aware of it (but they're not, since they weren't written for it). In a non-terminal editor like nvui, the new window could be just a view into a buffer, but still running inside the one instance of vim, allowing these plugins to keep working transparently, even though now there are multiple windows.

I don't think this is something that's easily possible with terminals without rewriting all the plugins that might need to be aware of it.

It's not something I'd want personally but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible for those that do.

The iTerm2/tmux integration show that's you can map TUI windows on to GUI windows including splits into new GUI windows.

It's actually possible to have both the TUI representation and GUI representation connected to the same remote tmux session.

https://iterm2.com/documentation-tmux-integration.html

Sounds like neovim-gtk has 2/3 (you can resize splits with the mouse, but you can't move them), but unfortunately, it's infrequently updated, sometimes I experience glitches, and it sometimes fails to build.

https://github.com/daa84/neovim-gtk/

Nvim already supports resizing splits with the mouse. Just :set mouse=a

> native window tabs

You might want to watch https://github.com/glacambre/nwin

> menu bar with some operations for which I can't be bothered to remember the key combination.

now, that's a good one.

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