From QED to Neovim
l-o-o-s-e-d.net
l-o-o-s-e-d.net
Dec 10 had SOS which was an ed-like line editor. And a port of qed IIRC. It had a concept of a viewport into a file with lines longer than 80 chars, other editors did folding but this one did scrolling in ascii. Emacs now does similar. Gosling Emacs was nice before gnu. Very simple cross file macro "do this sequence of commands" mode. Vi/ex used buffers and @execute to write programs the gosling Emacs was more "do it once then ask the editor to redo it again and again"
Nvi and Keith Bostic deserves telling too. Kind of died Midstream getting i8n and sub Windows fitted in.
The ed/sed/grep/awk unity over the syntax of the regex cannot be overstated. One investment in a syntax which embodied semantic intent in pattern match. The uplift into ex/vi was a no brainer.
I'll have to also look up SOS— thanks for mentioning! Haven't heard of Nvi, but that looks interesting. Thanks for sharing those. I'll have to make some edits to the post. I keep getting good add-ins like that. Love learning more about this stuff.
With these packages, keeping as stock as I could stand, I've got a great set of LSP and advanced editing features with minimal effort. It's been great.
I've also got helix set up with the LSP settings.
I ended up stealing some LSP config from AstroNvim or another Nvim "distro". I've never tried committing to one of those prebuilds though. I was always hacking at my own configs. I do like to skim some of the code though because they are generally implementing much better design patterns. I'm sure that the community will do a better job than me with Lua 9/10...
The obsessive dotfile management does help to give you a deep understanding of your editor though— I will say that.
I have no desire to move to Neovim. The Neovim community seems hell bent on turning Vim into another Emacs kitchen sink style ecosystem where no one values moderation and everyone is installing 100+ plugins they don't need. I haven't seen a single Neovim feature that actually helps me get work done more efficiently than how I already do it with Vim. Neovim feels like the first step since ed where the lineage has truly gone in the wrong direction.
Personally I use almost stock NeoVim (~30 lines config, with 2 tiny plugins, one of which I wrote myself). I find NeoVim to be very close to Vim, but with a few better corners. Things that I like are things like default `gc` operator for commenting and uncommenting portions of code.
1. it made async operations normal (Vim later did it too) which made things like lint-on-save much better
2. lua is better than vimscript which means easier plugin development. This in turn means it's more likely someone makes a plugin for neovim than for vim these days (e.g. newer completion/llm integrations exist for neovim which don't exist for vim)
I don't think "people installing 100 plugins" is a problem with neovim per se, people were installing tons of plugins before too, and "distributions" such as Janus existed before.
Not all of Neovim users do that, I think. My setup is pretty minimalist, other than basic requirements like syntax highlighting, linter... I have no desire to turn it into full-blown IDE like VS or IntelliJ. So no Astrovim, NVChar, Lunarvim etc etc. Just plain neovim. Actually that's the same way I setup vim. Both nvim and vim which shares the same config.
I feel that Neovims implementation of LSP and Treesitter is better than in Vim, and Lua is a magnitude better than Vimscript.
I remember QED. I suppose it was my first editor.