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Comment by andyl | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking forward to the combination of Tmux and Neovim. Both (will) support detached/shared sessions, both are scriptable/configurable, both can be driven by a remote process. I believe with Tmux and Neovim you could put together anything from a simple test/editing environment to a full-blown IDE.

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Unfortunately, Tmux still doesn't support true-color, which nvim added recently. I was hoping for it in the 2.0 release.

Well, no need to really look forward... You already have every one of those capabilities with Emacs.

>you could put together anything from a simple test/editing environment to a full-blown IDE.

People already do this with Emacs.

Emacs is great and I know lots of people who love evil mode. I prefer vim because it comes pre-installed - good for ops. Many of my tools have embedded Lua, so it's great that I can exercise my Lua skills with Neovim. None of my other tools embeds elisp, so for me, elisp is a dead-end.

Neovim won't be preinstalled for a long time. Possibly it never will be. Also, writing Elisp is not far from writing Guile Scheme, and there are many tools that embed Guile.

True that Neovim won't be preinstalled, but for ops all I need is basic editing and the ability to leverage my vim muscle-memory.

You're not doing a good sell for Emacs. People choose vi because of modal editing, not because they are ignorant of the Emacs feature set. You should at least say, "If you like vim for its modal editing features, but would also like support for session detachment along with a host of other stuff, you might find Spacemacs, or emacs with evil mode setup, a good alternative. There's a little bit of a learning curve, but it may be less than you think depending on how customized your vim setup is."

As someone who switched a few weeks ago, I would find that a much more intriguing breadcrumb trail.

> People choose vi because of modal editing, not because they are ignorant of the Emacs feature set.

Exactly this. I had used Emacs for many, many years and finally decided to give Vim a go... and never looked back. Emacs is very powerful, and while the Elisp infrastructure has distinct advantages over Vimscript, the compositional richness of Vim's editing model is amazing. I don't have to drop to scripting because Vim gives me the power I need more quickly and easily.

So, that said, have you tried out spacemacs? It's really, really good. It's not a zero cost switch, but I really think it makes the good things about vim work in emacs.

Curious that you chose to switch editor outright rather than just install some more modal package, after all those years. I chouse the former as the path of least resistance.

That choice was actually motivated for other reasons rather than just the modal workflow. The biggest of which was that (at the time) I found I had to really struggle to get Emacs and its ecosystem to play nicely with a highly project-centric workflow. I had used old vi regularly starting decades ago, and thus had basic usage burned in. E.g. I never understood these seemingly lame "minimal system editors" that some distros use vs. the old sysadmin standard of a minimal vi implementation (vs. full vim, emacs, etc.)

But it was becoming clear that something else was going on with modern vim, so after testing the waters a bit for my needs, I decided to go all-in as much as an ecosystem research project as anything else.

Last time I tried ansi-term and friends (not that long ago), it was very slow and struggled rendering my fairly vanilla (by some people's standards) shell prompt. Neovim's terminal emulation, by contrast, is a very great deal faster and can run Neovim inside itself with no discernible issues.

That's not actually a feature that was listed (because it's a pretty useless feature - I don't know anyone who actually uses ansi-term rather than screen/tmux, M-x shell or M-x eshell, and likewise it's not going to be useful for neovim to embed a terminal, the useful part is integration.)

But you can already script vim...

Only with blocking operations, though.

Yeah but - I like Neovim's msgpack-api, and the built-in terminal emulation. On the Neovim roadmap: attach/detach from a background session, multiple screens with different sizes.

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