Interview with TJ DeVries, Neovim core maintainer | Hacker News Reader

Interview with TJ DeVries, Neovim core maintainer

changelog.com

132 pointstambourine_man19 comments

Hi, tjdevries here.

Happy to try and answer any questions about the podcast or neovim generally :)

Nothing to ask but just wanted to say you seem like one of the most approachable people in open source. You are creating a great model to follow for developers of all walks of life, thanks for everything you do!

Wow, this is such an incredibly kind message! I had a really big smile on my face reading it. :)

I really appreciate it and hope I can live up to the standard I'm trying to set. Hope you have a really great day!

Has Neovim ever considered to a rolling release model?

Where I work, it’s considerably less of a headache to install Homebrew bottles instead of source/HEAD packages. There was a bug in Neovim 0.4 that I ran into every day for years—it was fixed in master but unreleased for a long time. I just had the same thing happen in 0.5.0: there’s a bug, it’s already fixed in master, but I can’t upgrade to HEAD.

The 0.5.0 release was obviously a historic release (tree sitter integration, LSP built-in, lua config engine) but the release was delayed for a long time. I’d love to know the team’s thoughts for or against having some sort of rolling release schedule (or other strategy) to release earlier and/or more frequently.

Rolling release is kind of hard. We want to make sure that we keep our promises that we've set forth in `:help api-contract` and other expectations about semver. We think this is very beneficial for the plugin writing community. It's also hard because sometimes we merge something into master, before a release, and then recognize that a change to an API, an extension, etc. may be necessary for a feature to truly be great. Rolling release can make some of these things very hard.

However, we're hoping to release more often now to prevent this kind of situation.

I'm not 100% the person to talk to about releases, I primarily just try and write code to make Lua more fun to use :)

Side Note: You can install the HEAD of neovim easily with brew. `brew install neovim --HEAD` I think will do that for you. I'm not sure if that's what you mean by source/HEAD packages or not (I have no idea anything about Mac).

Hi tjdevries, I have been thinking about switching to neovim from vim.

Do you have any advice/reference for setting up Latex Synctex (Forward and Backwards search) for neovim and evince (on Linux)?

From looking online there seem to be several possible approaches for doing this in neovim (currently in Vim I use an adapted version of evince_dbus.py from the latex gedit latex plugin but it was a pain to get set up!)

I have to phone a friend in this one. I don't know much about latex in neovim these days.

I pinged a buddy of mine to hopefully be able to respond here though!

Ok, got some responses from him (I don't know what any of these things mean haha):

vimtex works perfectly on neovim (in fact, the main developer uses neovim) and is very well documented

texlab (the latex lsp server) also does build and forward search (although there's a small bug at the moment)

Oh, and backward search needs neovim-remote (\o/ mhinz); just use nvr --remote +"%line" "%file" as backward search command

https://github.com/lervag/vimtex/blob/5d1335d095d11f48a6744f...

(the vimtex dev uses Zathura, so that may be an alternative viewer to look into)

Thank you for the detailed answer, I really appreciate it.

It it great to know that the main developer for vimtex uses neovim.

I will try the neovim/vimtex/zathura combination used by the dev!

You gotta love HN. Threads like this just makes you smile.

Just to follow up, my attempts to get vimtex to work unfortunately were unsuccessful. However, along the way reading neovim plugin docs I started to figure out the difference between neovim and vim and was able to get things working via the following process:

sudo dnf install neovim

sudo dnf install python3-neovim

mkdir -p ~/.config/pack/foo/opt/mytex

cd ~/.config/pack/foo/opt/mytex

[download https://github.com/peterbjorgensen/sved/ftplugin]

cp ~/.vimrc ~/.config/nvim/init.vim

add the line "packadd mytex" to init.vim

add the line "alias vim='nvim'" to ~/.bashrc :)

Hey TJ, I'm a newb programmer that's switching to Neovim from VS Code. I just want to say thanks for making vim more accessible. You have done great work :)

Awesome

One of us! One of us! One of us! ;)

Previous episode on (classic) Vim was also great, with a wonderful cast:

https://changelog.com/podcast/450

For anyone who wants to help the project - they accept donations via GitHub Sponsors[1], targeting $6k a month to hire a full-time developer, but falling short of it.

[1] https://github.com/sponsors/neovim

Hi TJ Devries, thanks so much for all your efforts and helping newbs like us to get into VIM ..

My pleasure :) I have tons of fun doing it!

Adam here from Changelog.com. There’s a transcript as well if you’d like to read or scan the conversation.

That is great! Hope do you make those transcripts? Any advice for someone who wants to do the same?

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