Vim 8.2

[oblio]

Say what you want about Neovim, but it sure motivated Bram to make Vim better again. Almost everything listed here looks like a direct reaction to features Neovim has added. Same for older releases (async, terminal, etc.).

Competition is good and I'm glad we're having it.

[anonova]

Yes, I didn't expect to see popup windows, which seems to a be a direct response to Neovim's floating windows (https://twitter.com/Neovim/status/1101879098044043264).

[caycep]

Just out of curiosity (and this goes into the subject of open source project dynamics of which I am really just a lay observer, and as someone who hasn't followed the history of either projects closely) - how is vim vs neovim organized as open source projects? Do both have a healthy ecosystem of contributor/maintaners? Are either in danger of running into "single person syndrome" or "hit-by-a-bus" syndrome?

[agumonkey]

reminds me of clang/gcc

ps: I honestly wonder if it's a competition feeling or just a side-induced motivation. Sometimes I look at people online and it revives the desire to do things they do that I couldn't before.

[vr46]

I switched to NeoVim a few years ago and I'm not entirely sure whether Vim has caught up in features, diverged, or what ratio of the two. That said, I'm not switching back. The only editor I'm really interested in is VSCode. Not that I use it much, but I am very impressed.

[onebot]

> That said, I'm not switching back.

Me either.

If you go back to early stories of Bram, the BDFL, when others tried to add Neovim features to vim. He wasn't onboard. Not to discount all the amazing contributions he has done and his importance. But I just think it is karma.

Here is another hacker news post discussing the backstory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12481084

Here is a bit of shade tossed on the Neovim project back in 2014 by Bram: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/vim_dev/x0BF9Y0Uby...

[Devagamster]

May I interest you in https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim which let's you use some of the most popular bits of vs code in neovim

[petre]

I still use both but lately Neovim just works better although I think it uses more memory. It could be the appimage though. Most of the extensions that I use in Neovim are written in VimL (Pathogen and Lightline and the Monokai Tasty color scheme). In some terminals (Xfce term) nvim messes up vim paste until you reset the term. It's very annoying.

[weinzierl]

The really big news is that vim is now a game engine too;-)

> To show what is possible with popup windows (and because I sometimes get bored fixing bugs), I created a silly game. This uses popup windows that move across the display, text properties to highlight the animals and even sound to make it more fun!

https://github.com/vim/killersheep

[thelazydogsback]

I've never gotten gVim to look anything but horrible. (Haven't tried in a few years, so just installed this one and the window and font are so small they would require a hefty magnifying glass to use.)

AFAICT, the sanest version of "real" vim that seems turnkey is the version of vim that runs in git bash in the cygwin shell that installs with git extension for windows. Other than that, the VS and VSCode vi emulators do most of what I want and then I'm not tempted to to go down the dark hole of vim extensions.

[p1esk]

I'm using plain vim occasionally, but never tried to do any coding in it, just because I'm not sure how to configure it for that. Which plugins for Python coding are universally agreed on as "must haves" Preferably just one, or two at most.

[njt]

> Which plugins for Python coding are universally agreed on as "must haves" Preferably just one, or two at most.

I wrote Python in Vim for about 15 years before finding python-mode[0] about 4 years ago and I now find it absolutely indispensable.

Just about the only thing that it doesn't do natively is Black[1] (think gofmt for Python) which I started using a few months ago. It's not too hard to run it occasionally on my codebase, but I hope it's added in soon.

python-mode did remove its folding capabilties some time back, but it was easy to use another plugin for that: vim-coiled-snake[2].

Apart from these two plugins, and vim-fugitive[3] for git (another one that is a must-have), I don't use anything else except for the occasional syntax coloring plugin.

[0] https://github.com/python-mode/python-mode

[1] https://black.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

[2] https://github.com/kalekundert/vim-coiled-snake

[3] https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive

[tcbawo]

I used vim for a development IDE and customized extensively. These days, I've had to relearn stock vim, since I tend to log onto many corporate servers that aren't guaranteed to have my environment/plugins/settings. Also, the state of C++ syntax/symbol parsing wasn't where I needed it to be. Maybe it's gotten better?

I've found Nerdtree to be most indispensable. Other good ones are pathogen, ctrlp, a.vim, and vim-gitgutter

[zhengyi13]

There are a lot of ways to skin this particular cat.

I've found vim-lsp is probably the best starting point, as you can plug any server you want into it, and have a consistent interface.

https://github.com/prabirshrestha/vim-lsp/wiki/Servers-Pytho...

[camgunz]

Vim's included Python support already does language-specific stuff like syntax highlighting and indenting. I think people use Jedi for autocomplete; I've never used it.

I'm one of the "computing for the apocalypse" people who try and configure things as little as possible, but I'm really attached to linting in Vim, and I use ALE [1] for this. AIUI it's the standard for asynchronous linting; Syntastic is the synchronous version, but the lag is juuuust a little too much for me.

netrw (Vim's included file browser plugin) has a lot of bugs on macOS, so I use NERDtree there, but have been thinking about looking around at nnn, defx, vim-netranger, etc.

Other than that, Vim has a lot of powerful configuration. It's worth looking around and fixing any immediate pain points you have; odds are there's an option that does what you want. Three cheers for mature software!

[1]: https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale

[dfrunza]

I use Vim to code, but it took me a lot of time to find to configure it. My primary need when coding is quick jump to symbol definition, and after many trial and error attempts, settled on the plugins `vimprj` and `indexer` in combination with Universal Ctags. Have been using this setup for years and it's proven to be stable and giving me the result I need.

But I hate Vim.

It's so fragile. Configuring it is a nightmare. One buggy plugin could cause weird behaviour in the editor, and I'd had a hard time figuring out why.

In a recent incident of this kind, I noticed that the scrolling of syntax highlihted code became horribly slow, and the cause turned out to be the new regex engine of Vim 8.

So I've compiled Vim 7.4 from scratch, and intend on using that version till the end of time. By the way - my plugins are manually installed and I never upgrade them. Ever.

[crehn]

You don't necessarily need any plugins. Vanilla Vim with the occasional ctrl+N is often enough. If you need a more powerful editor, perhaps it's better to just use something like VS Code.

[timwaagh]

You don't need any for python, really. You can run pdb in your :term split, which is nice. Other than that you only really get the vim advantage over IDE if you practice.

[daenz]

Shameless plug, I wrote Snake for Vim, which helps you configure Vim to be more flexible for writing code, using regular Python.

https://github.com/amoffat/snake

[haldora]

Check out VimAwesome (https://vimawesome.com) for finding plugins. They provide instructions for installing each plugin via Vundle, NeoBundle, VimPlug, and Pathogen.

[Asooka]

You Complete Me is pretty good for autocompleting python, c, c++ and c#. For python it doesn't need any set up.

[war1025]

I've been doing python development in vim for the past 8 years with no plugins. Works perfectly fine.

[stewbrew]

Wow. For a "minor" release, this is really exciting. Finally, vim gets text properties. This could be a real game changer for plugin writers. Popup windows could also be interesting.

[__s]

https://www.vim.org/vim-8.2-released.php

[wyldfire]

This page is remarkably more informative than the commit diff, let's consider updating the url to this instead.

[dang]

Ok, we changed to that from https://github.com/vim/vim/commit/98056533b96b6b5d8849641de9.... Thanks!

[dmortin]

The pink color of those popups is brutal.

[dogwhistle]

At this point, vim is hindering progress. While they finally compied almost all of additional features of neovim, there is no sense of innovation and progress there and unfortunately the diff with neovim is right now minimal so neovim loses contributors that would otherwise be

[earenndil]

I don't see how vim can be hindering progress when it, along with emacs, is more powerful than the editors that 99% of other people are using.

[dmortin]

Sort of like the Gnu Emacs / XEmacs split back then which divided the contributors. At least in case of Emacs one of these came on top, so there is no split anymore.

[majewsky]

Not sure which point you're trying to make. Vim is hindering progress by progressing in all the areas that NeoVim was also progressing??

[Scarbutt]

With vscode recent remote capabilities its hard to push(come up with a argument) vim/emacs for programmers who do dev in remote VMs.

[Blaiz0r]

With Vim being such a complete and powerful piece of software that still receives useful yet light features and is extensible to a dizzying degree, it's hard to push vscode on programmers that want an efficient tool.

[thesuperbigfrog]

Tramp mode (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode) has been part of emacs for some time now.

[__s]

I tried vscode's remote capabilities. Ended up back on SSH/tmux/vim workflow. Ctrl-p file lookup was too slow, I like my shell, I didn't find the vscode terminal to be the best terminal experience

[wyldfire]

Help me understand more: what are "remote capabilities" wrt vscode?

I kicked the tires on vscode and atom and while I liked lots of things about them, it seemed like they were kinda overboard with memory consumption. These things are ultimately running web browsers, right? I'll probably have to give it another look.

[Exuma]

Does vscode have vim emulation or actual vim that runs plugins. If it's the former, your statement is ludicrous.

[mixmastamyk]

sshfs has been a thing I've used with any editor for at least a decade. Making it part of the editor itself instead of the file manager is bloaty.

[p1esk]

How is it better than the good old remote deployment feature in Pycharm?