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Comment by jherdman | Hacker News Reader

(Neo)Vim and colour schemes are the thing that finally pushed me to use VSCode after more than a decade of using Vim. I was just so fed up with trying to find the right incantations of environment variables to get the damn things to work correctly every single time. Hats off to those still fighting the good fight.

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That's been my experience for 10 years. (Before that, I didn't even know Vim could have color schemes)

These things look beautiful on the web page. But dang it's so hard to get your terminal, Tmux and Vim/NeoVim to display properly. I've literally used Distinguished as my color scheme for 10 years just because I got it working, it looks nice and I really don't want to fight with configs.

I'm still not interested in using VSCode as my daily driver though. I tried it for about 6 months solid. It wasn't for me.

The (arcane) tricks to make vim or any editor work well is:

* export TERM=xterm-256color

* Use tmux attach -2 (-2=256color)

* In tmux <c-b>:set -g escape-time 0

* In vim, :set t_Co=256

If your terminal is the issue, use rxvt-unicode256color as it is the best terminal emulator (kitty is too slow (Python), urxvtd can segfault, xterm lacks features), or iTerm2 for Mac (Terminal.app recently broke colors and haven't figured out how to fix them, plus it lacks panes which I use to simulate an i3 environment). On Mac you have to enable option as meta key to make alt work as well

I use kitty and I have not experienced any slowness. What is slow about it?

I use i3 and win+enter is bound to spawn a new terminal. I had read that kitty was supposed to be super fast, but I tried it out and spawning a terminal was taking .5-1 second!

I looked it up and found https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/330 where the dev says:

> that's just python interpreter startup time

So... The answer is just "yeah it's slow". When you're used to a few milliseconds for terminal spawn, .5s is eons.

I use --single-instance and it spawns much faster (and eats way less memory). Even without this switch it does not take this long on my machine (certainly less than half a second), but yes it takes noticeably longer than, say, urxvt.

I've found it's easier to keep every terminal app with its bone stock color/theme config and then just change your termianl app's color palette directly to a different theme. You might lose out on all kinds of extra colors for various things beyond 16 different levels (i.e. the typical terminal color palette) but it's so much easier and still looks pretty nice 90% of the time.

VS code + the vim mode/keystrokes extension is a solid replacement IMHO. I still keep neovim around for quick terminal edits, but I no longer try to have a fancy config or setup with it--it's just too much work and constantly breaking with plugin updates.

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