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Comment by actinium226 | Hacker News Reader

But where are the AI features?? Gonna get left behind!

Only joking of course, actually quite refreshing to see a new version announcement of something this major without any AI nonsense.

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I made a vim extension where you describe the edit/action you want in natural language, and my ollama model thats trained on books like Practical Vim returns the key sequence and you can press e to execute without leaving vim. So you get automation help but also learn the syntax.

I used mcp-neovim-server to let my LLM control my vim session. that way it can debug and test and poke around. It's crazy good at debugging plugins. It's absurd how little these things need to look-up docs; half these models are just out the box wildly good at vim. "Open these files on these lines" and now there are four splits with me at the relevant line numbers. Awesome. And it'll explain how to do things & test it out & validate! https://github.com/bigcodegen/mcp-neovim-server

That was a little tricky to set-up. I ended up writing nvim-auto-listen, which uses some heuristics to find your project root, and starts a .nvim.socket in that directory. That makes it easy for mcp-neovim-server instances to find. https://github.com/rektide/nvim-auto-listen/

I'm only somewhat getting started, but the workmanship, fit and finish is just outstanding on Codecompanion, for a fantastically well put together in vim agentic experience. Works really well driving a headless opencode mcp. Being able to stay in vim but still get a great opencode powered experience has been mind blowingly sick. https://github.com/olimorris/codecompanion.nvim

That's pretty nifty. Link please

> But where are the AI features?? Gonna get left behind!

Obviously vim doesn't need AI, but one feature I really wish vim had was native support for multiple cursors.

It's the feature that lured me away to Sublime Text in the first place many years ago, and it's a pre-requisite for pretty much every editor I use these days, from VSCode to Zed.

There are plugins, but multicursor is such a powerful force-multiplier that I think a native implementation would benefit.

The canonical answer to this request is as follows: if you need multi-cursor (or, worse, multi-cursor with mouse support) then you are doing something non-Vim way (aka: wrong way) and there is a better way to do it.

If you need multi-cursor to do manual search and replace in text, then don't, just do automatic search and replace, maybe scoped to a block. If you need multi-cursor for refactoring or renaming a variable across entire source file, then don't, use LSP plugin (or switch to Neovim) and do the proper refactoring action.

Sure, there are legit cases of using multi-cursor in Vim, but they are rare. So it's not worth to put it into Vim itself.

personally, I know I can use search and replace, but <ctrl-n>-n-n-c-replacement[0] is easier on my mind than the search&replace alternative

[0] I've been using vim-multiple-cursors for years, it's abandoned but still works ok most of the time.

Do you know about *? It puts the word currently under the cursor into the search history.

So you can do *ciw, type your replacement, then n.n.n. to do the rest.

Obviously LSPs are more powerful though.

Multi cursor is on the neovim roadmap https://neovim.io/roadmap/

Funny, I used multiple cursor a lot back when I used Sublime Text, but stopped needing them when I switched to Vim.

Vim (kind of) has it though it doesn’t render the cursors:

Ctrl-V, then move down the lines you want to edit, Shift-I to insert text on multiple lines at once.

There are plenty of ways to achieve workflows that can be done witg multiple cursors even in plain Vim: macros, :norm, visual blocks, :s, etc.

I'm curious to know what kind of editing you do that you need this so much?

It's a pretty useful feature when writing code.

How does it work?

Vim and its ilk have plenty of AI.

Actual Intelligence. It's connected to fingers/hands/arms/torso that is using it.

I agree and I know what you're saying, but I'm pretty curious: how are people using AI with vim? I've seen some scripts for ollama but what are most people doing?

I don't use it this way yet, but aider has a watch mode that would be fun with vim:

https://aider.chat/docs/usage/watch.html

I imagine with vim, from the document you're editing, you'd go:

:ter

to get a terminal. Fire up aider with --watch-files in the terminal. Hop back up to the file and start telling it what to do. Hit L when it's done to see the changes.

That's just a guess but after writing it out I kinda want to try it.

When I use aider it's via its chat interface and then I load the file with vim in another terminal tab to follow along but I think --watch-files with vim would be fun.

At least for Neovim, there are many official or community-made AI autocomplete plugins, and a bunch of chat interfaces as well

Does it count if I share my experience with AI and nvim? I use it to update my configuration, discover new plugins, write custom lua code (I don't know lua) and inquire about motions that would help me in specific workflows. I started learning vim motions last summer and AI really lowered the entry barrier and allowed me to focus on the motions rather than the setup.

Also related to my nvim workflow but not strictly vim related: I use AI to write and update a bash script that handles tmux windows. Again, it lowered the barrier to entry and it made switching to nvim as my primary editor easier.

tmux + vim + Claude Code

This. With so much of my work being done with Claude Code via terminal, I’ve used vim and tmux more than I have in the 20 years since I was first introduced.

How many people don’t know tmux in the industry is really beyond me.

What's the elevator pitch if I already know Screen and I can just open multiple windows of the terminal emulator?

No pitch - just use screen, most people use tmux in exactly the same way - open a few splits and switch between them with keyboard shortcuts.

Tmux is better supported by other tools, such as fzf.

I switched from screen to tmux due to rumor about the screen code base. Maybe not a good reason. But I don’t regret it, tmux works well.

Just an honest opinion of someone who didn’t have skin in the game. Not sure if it helps.

The people GP are talking about don't know about GNU screen either.

With all the buzz about orchestrating in the age of CLI agents there doesn't seem to be much talk about vim + tmux with send-keys (a blessing). You can run as many windows and panes doing so many different things across multiple projects.

The way I see it using tmux to orchestrate multiple agents is an intermediate step until we get a UI that can be a product offering. Assuming we get orchestration to the level it has been touted, there is a world where tmux is unnecessary for the user. You would just type something to one panel in which the "overlord" agent is running (the "mayor" if we talking gas town lingo) and that agent will handle all the rest. I doubt jumping between panes is going to stick around as the product offering evolves.

same, although I'm using zellij instead of tmux. Copilot works well in vim too.

Nearly this, but using ghostty instead of tmux. You don’t get the remote connection aspect of tmux, but for splitting/zooming/preserving windows it is fantastic. The best part is you can configure natural shortcuts rather than using a leader for everything.

As a tmux user, sell me on ghostty. I hate the leader key, especially in VIM.

The copilot plugin works well

That's good to know. I've never actually tried Copilot. I was going to try this week.

Totally worth it. I tied it to openrouter.ai so that I could use 'all the AI's' (TM)

Totally worth it

AI makes advanced IDE features less relevant (or, more precisely, much easier to ignore or work without.)

I still have PyCharm, especially for working with data which I do a lot it helps quite a bit, but by default I'm back to a very vanilla Vim setup. Others have mentioned tmux which is great and I'd use anyway especially over ssh, but even just terminal tabs for instances of agents are fine frankly.

Avante.nvim is quite active

Vim is a ironically far better suited to agectic coding than any other ide in my opinion.

I was happy with VSCode after decades of Vim because it felt light enough out of the box until Copilot starting showing up in every nook and cranny of the damn thing. I switch back to Vim last year.

As a side note, vim works great with Ai plug-ins.

The announcement itself looks potentially AI-assisted, judging by the bulleted list style and redundant text under the "Charity: Transition to Kuwasha" section. But maybe some people just write that way.

I admit I am guilty of that, although I ran it via several iterations to make sure it covers everything I needed and created a nice style that i liked. It just saves me so much time.

Wait a couple of more months, and no-none will know to write any other way.

:please exit vim now

AISREIR

AI Should Rewrite Everything In Rust

More like AESIR, AI Enhancing Stupidly In Rust.

Bonus point linking the name to the hellish corporation in Max Payne.

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