Comment by 41b696ef1113 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 41b696ef1113 | Hacker News Reader

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I am willing to take the philosophical stance that even if NeoVim was only a 1:1 feature parity of Vim, it would still be a GoodThing. We need to find a way to dig ourselves out of endless backwards compatibility and advance the state of software. Supporting 8.3 filenames no longer has its place.

This[0] post about the early days of NeoVim development made some interesting points about Vim, but one choice quote I recalled and had to google,

> Some of Vim’s source code isn’t even valid text. It’s not ASCII or UTF-8. The venerable file can’t figure out the encoding...

Re-building things to a more solid foundation enables new workflows that are currently challenging. As a Vim user, I have longingly looked at the Emacs ecosystem, with its saner extension language (though Emacs lisp has its own historical baggage weighing them down). Once Lua becomes the default, I expect to see new evolution in features that would otherwise not have made it to the Vim scene. At worst, I can imagine VSCode javascript plugins get transpiled to Lua to run within NeoVim.

[0] https://geoff.greer.fm/2015/01/15/why-neovim-is-better-than-...

There has been a lot of talk around here lately about modernizing emacs. It really seems to me that neovim is shaping up to be the new “modern” emacs. With full lua integration, lsp, gui clients, and projects like neorg it’s getting a lot closer to building its own emacs like ecosystem.

Is neovim really flexible enough to compete with emacs? Adding just more tooling is not really what would make it shine in emacs-space. My impression is more that neovim is competing with the likes of Sublime Text, maybe to some degree with VS Code.

Is Neovim flexible enough that it could stop being vim? Remove the modal key-system and implement something of your own? Has enough introspektion to allow something like emacs which-keys? This is a module which show a list of valid keys that can be pressed when you are inside a keychain.

> Has enough introspektion to allow something like emacs which-keys?

Yes. https://github.com/folke/which-key.nvim

I like the NeoVim project and think Lua is a great scripting language, and so I wish the project all the best, but it is not attempting to scratch many of the itches that Emacs and Elisp do for many of us old timers.

Would you care to elaborate a bit? I think both Emacs and Vim have valid use cases, and I am interested to hear your opinion.

To choose just one example, but one that illustrates the gulf between the two projects.

For shell interaction, I use eshell, a UNIX shell written in Elisp, as often as I use anything else. It has some sharp edges, but it takes more sharp edges off shell interaction so it generally makes, for me, the most pleasant way to interact with the shell.

I am aware of no NeoVim project aiming at something like eshell, and it would not, I think, be a good fit for the NeoVim philosophy if it were tried.

It does help that the project is a tiny fraction of the size. I hope it mostly stays that way despite the odd new feature.

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