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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

A light bulb went off in my head, is Neovim able to use Emacs as a GUI yet? Why emulate VIM in 2023 when you can just become a GUI for it.

I'm still waiting for JetBrains to wake up from sleeping at the wheel and implement a Neovim client for their IDE core.

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Its certainly possible, though useless.

Most vim emulation plugins struggle with accuracy, EVIL exceeds it. Manly due to evil-collection and various other packages, pretty much every emacs package has evil support, and that integration feels very native to emacs

This is a case where being a neovim gui would be worse. Though, someone could totally do it for shits and giggles.

Finally, that operating system would have a decent text editor :)

Out of the box several changes are needed to get it truly vim-like. Off the top of my head

- global undo tree

- the " and * registers work very differently than in vim, but there's a setting to fix it

It's kinda embarrassing, JB wants to push their new editor, but even months after public beta, the vim emulator is still barely usable, and afaict it's maybe like 1-2 people working on this.

I don't get it, if you are targeting developers, why is it that having Vim keybindings not a top priority? Or am I living in my own circle?

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/FL-10664

My thinking is, if you focus heavily on letting your editor be a client for Neovim, you now can pull in all the stubborn VIM users easily. "Look! It behaves the most like vim that any editor you've ever used does!"

I fully agree with you. I'm not sure why they're asleep at the wheel.

You may very well be living in your own circle. My anecdata is that most engineers use VSCode these days. In my current organisation I am the only person that uses Emacs that I am aware of (and I use evil-mode). I know a handful of people use (n)vim. But by far the most common editor I see being used is VSCode.

I work on a frontend team, most of my coworkers use VSCode and very few use the vim plugin for it. On our backend teams I believe IntelliJ is still the most popular editor, it’s really uncommon to find anyone using vim or eMacs for work.

Personally I just use Jetbrains IDEs w/ IdeaVIM for most things because I can’t be bothered with all the plugins and configurations I would rather my IDE just work out the box in any language.

In my experience anyone using something other than VSCode, or Major IDE is a noteworthy signal that the developer cares about their tools and is probably better than the median.

There's an interesting blog post from a recruiting company breaking down the data they have on editors and developer success in their interview process. https://triplebyte.com/blog/technical-interview-performance-...

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