Perhaps the author should take a look at Helix. I’ve been using Helix professionally on large Rust codebases for the last 2 years, and it works incredibly well. Lightning fast startup, snappy, built-in LSP, tons of navigation features.
Helix is nice, but the keymaps are just different enough and just similar enough to really screw with my brain. I stopped using it because it was just too wacky for my head.
It messed with me initially too, but after using Helix for a couple months now I feel the same when trying to use Vim. It’s a matter of switching habits - which, if you don’t wanna do, that’s perfectly okay.
I was swayed over by the fact that it’s a lightweight modal editor where everything just works.
I personally don’t like spending lots of my precious spare hours on configuration to get something barely usable, so that was a huge value add for me. I just had to learn the shortcuts.
The problem for me is, VI keybindings/culture is practically everywhere. So I would have to keep 2 keybindings in my head, that are just close enough to mess everything up.
I agree I could switch to Helix bindings if I was only using Helix, but when no other tool supports Helix bindings/culture it’s just not worth the ease of setup to me. Give me Helix with VI keybindings and I’d be very happy.
I want 2 editors, one for terminal use that’s instant(neovim currently) and a GUI editor that’s more like an IDE that’s also fast(Zed in VIM mode currently). I’d love a great defaults editor like neovim in the terminal, so far I haven’t been able to find it.
After using Kakoune and then Helix, I really don’t have that much difficulty using Neovim/Vi bindings when I need to beyond the occasional ‘oh, right I’m in Neovim’. I realise that my own experience is not necessarily true for everyone but I did worry about the same thing when I started using Kakoune. I also worried when I played both tennis and badminton that the technique or timing of one would affect the other, and my partner worried that learning Italian would affect her Spanish. But I think the brain is better than we assume at distinguishing similar things (programming languages as another example).
the brain is better than we assume at distinguishing similar things (programming languages as another example).
Absolutely. My favourite example of this is people who can play both violin and viola - if anything would screw with your muscle memory that would, but they’re fine. (I’m not quite that impressive, myself, but I can play other fretless string instruments with different scale lengths.)
I’ll second this. Helix has been extremely stable, fast, and featureful over the past year or so.
I like that it doesn’t have unbounded configuration options, too. I’ve only really changed the theme and made the keybindings closer to what Kakoune provided.
Wow never heard of helix and have been giving it a shot for the last few hours.
One thing I find really difficult to get used to is that selections are being made constantly while moving the cursor, and I have to think harder than usual to “manage” that. For example if I hit e to move to the end of the word, the word is selected. If I hit i to insert before the last char in the word (like in vim) then the cursor is moved back to the beginning. To do what I wanted, I’d have to e, then deselect the word (:, I think?), then i.
Am I just holding it wrong or is this something you’ve just gotten used to?
The sentiment started to shift again not too long ago as I started working in some really large code bases, and boy Neovim was struggling. I would have random hang ups, frozen screens, stuff that just drove me nuts when productivity was king. I tried switching to other terminal emulators too such as Alacritty and Wezterm but it didn’t help much.
I’m sure Zed is cool and I’m glad the author is enjoying it, but I can’t take the post seriously after this.
No snark, and no false ignorance, but why not? That is, I don’t know why the author had problems with large codebases, but I don’t see any reason to assume that he’s somehow unserious if he did.
To put this another way, what are you assuming you know that the author does not?
Pretty much what the other commenter said. To think that your terminal emulator is a bottleneck in this case demonstrates such a profound misunderstanding of what is going on that it’s difficult to imagine that the author put any effort into profiling his setup or optimizing his use of plugins. If this was his primary motivation for leaving neovim then it’s not a very compelling story.
Why would the author’s debugging skills on performance issues be a factor for dismissing the post, which is about user experience and personal preferences?
Changing how it displays is not going to improve the running of the program if memory limits are your issue. Very likely they had plugins which were running for far longer than they realized which was preventing neovim from being snappy. There are ways to debug startup and runtime but switching terminal emulators really won’t fix that.
Using lazy.nvim forced me to think about the context that plugins were used, too. Changing plugins to only load when needed resulted in a huge startup speed boost.
That said, this is a lot more work than in something like VSCode, where plugins specify the conditions under which it makes sense for them to load and I never have to think about it. Some Vim extensions include lazy configs in the setup notes, but I think putting the onus on the plugin rather than the user configuring it is probably the best approach.
I’ve been on the same Neovim → Zed boat and I echo pretty much everything the author has to say. It’s been a very refreshing experience and I for one welcome the AI features (I love the inline assist feature). I too have a similar Neovim/tmux-esque custom keymap config.
One of the main reasons for my switch was that TUI applications (Neovim et al) have a certain amount of “jank” that you should be willing to put up with. With Zed, I can have my cake (minimalist editor) and eat it too (no jank).
I for one welcome the AI features (I love the inline assist feature)
I think being able to patch in a local CodeLlama to your editor is a really interesting feature and I hope this trend of local models and strong customizability continues.
It’s really interesting to me that, due to the Cambrian explosion of neovim plugins (layered on top of the existing collection of vim plugins), two peoples experiences of using neovim can be so vastly different.
I really tried to like Zed, I even forced myself to use it as a daily driver for a while. The result is always the same, I end up uninstalling it. It’s probably a me thing, not the editor’s fault, but I don’t care about their AI integration and collaboration features. That’s the great thing about having choices, there’s something for almost everyone out there.
Perhaps the author should take a look at Helix. I’ve been using Helix professionally on large Rust codebases for the last 2 years, and it works incredibly well. Lightning fast startup, snappy, built-in LSP, tons of navigation features.
Helix is nice, but the keymaps are just different enough and just similar enough to really screw with my brain. I stopped using it because it was just too wacky for my head.
It messed with me initially too, but after using Helix for a couple months now I feel the same when trying to use Vim. It’s a matter of switching habits - which, if you don’t wanna do, that’s perfectly okay.
I was swayed over by the fact that it’s a lightweight modal editor where everything just works. I personally don’t like spending lots of my precious spare hours on configuration to get something barely usable, so that was a huge value add for me. I just had to learn the shortcuts.
The problem for me is, VI keybindings/culture is practically everywhere. So I would have to keep 2 keybindings in my head, that are just close enough to mess everything up.
I agree I could switch to Helix bindings if I was only using Helix, but when no other tool supports Helix bindings/culture it’s just not worth the ease of setup to me. Give me Helix with VI keybindings and I’d be very happy.
I want 2 editors, one for terminal use that’s instant(neovim currently) and a GUI editor that’s more like an IDE that’s also fast(Zed in VIM mode currently). I’d love a great defaults editor like neovim in the terminal, so far I haven’t been able to find it.
Totally agree with avoiding precious spare hours on configuration.
But on the other hand, I’d rather spend a few hours/days on configuration in exchange of having a good environment for a few years.
Related XKCD: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/is_it_worth_the_time.png
After using Kakoune and then Helix, I really don’t have that much difficulty using Neovim/Vi bindings when I need to beyond the occasional ‘oh, right I’m in Neovim’. I realise that my own experience is not necessarily true for everyone but I did worry about the same thing when I started using Kakoune. I also worried when I played both tennis and badminton that the technique or timing of one would affect the other, and my partner worried that learning Italian would affect her Spanish. But I think the brain is better than we assume at distinguishing similar things (programming languages as another example).
Absolutely. My favourite example of this is people who can play both violin and viola - if anything would screw with your muscle memory that would, but they’re fine. (I’m not quite that impressive, myself, but I can play other fretless string instruments with different scale lengths.)
I’ll second this. Helix has been extremely stable, fast, and featureful over the past year or so.
I like that it doesn’t have unbounded configuration options, too. I’ve only really changed the theme and made the keybindings closer to what Kakoune provided.
I’d like to second this. I’ve spent ~15 years being “vimcurious” but it never stuck. I ended up getting comfortable with Helix in a weekend.
In a way, I feel lucky that I never got good at Vim, I have nothing to unlearn!
Why not both?
I’ve been:
And though it may be a bit avant guard, it’s an increasingly sharp set of tools.
Fyi, Avant-garde
Wow never heard of helix and have been giving it a shot for the last few hours.
One thing I find really difficult to get used to is that selections are being made constantly while moving the cursor, and I have to think harder than usual to “manage” that. For example if I hit
eto move to the end of the word, the word is selected. If I hitito insert before the last char in the word (like in vim) then the cursor is moved back to the beginning. To do what I wanted, I’d have toe, then deselect the word (:, I think?), theni.Am I just holding it wrong or is this something you’ve just gotten used to?
I think you are expected to press
ato append to end of selection rather thani.I’m sure Zed is cool and I’m glad the author is enjoying it, but I can’t take the post seriously after this.
No snark, and no false ignorance, but why not? That is, I don’t know why the author had problems with large codebases, but I don’t see any reason to assume that he’s somehow unserious if he did.
To put this another way, what are you assuming you know that the author does not?
Pretty much what the other commenter said. To think that your terminal emulator is a bottleneck in this case demonstrates such a profound misunderstanding of what is going on that it’s difficult to imagine that the author put any effort into profiling his setup or optimizing his use of plugins. If this was his primary motivation for leaving neovim then it’s not a very compelling story.
Why would the author’s debugging skills on performance issues be a factor for dismissing the post, which is about user experience and personal preferences?
Changing how it displays is not going to improve the running of the program if memory limits are your issue. Very likely they had plugins which were running for far longer than they realized which was preventing neovim from being snappy. There are ways to debug startup and runtime but switching terminal emulators really won’t fix that.
This was the case for me and let me to rewrite my configuration from 100(!) plugins down to half that.
Using lazy.nvim forced me to think about the context that plugins were used, too. Changing plugins to only load when needed resulted in a huge startup speed boost.
That said, this is a lot more work than in something like VSCode, where plugins specify the conditions under which it makes sense for them to load and I never have to think about it. Some Vim extensions include lazy configs in the setup notes, but I think putting the onus on the plugin rather than the user configuring it is probably the best approach.
Why is that?
Neovim doesn’t need plugins for LSP autocompletion now (nightly 0.11)
I’ve been on the same Neovim → Zed boat and I echo pretty much everything the author has to say. It’s been a very refreshing experience and I for one welcome the AI features (I love the inline assist feature). I too have a similar Neovim/tmux-esque custom keymap config.
One of the main reasons for my switch was that TUI applications (Neovim et al) have a certain amount of “jank” that you should be willing to put up with. With Zed, I can have my cake (minimalist editor) and eat it too (no jank).
I think being able to patch in a local CodeLlama to your editor is a really interesting feature and I hope this trend of local models and strong customizability continues.
I’ll have to try that. I’ve spun up local llama a few times but I never had a use case before. This might be interesting enough to actually use it.
It’s really interesting to me that, due to the Cambrian explosion of neovim plugins (layered on top of the existing collection of vim plugins), two peoples experiences of using neovim can be so vastly different.
I really tried to like Zed, I even forced myself to use it as a daily driver for a while. The result is always the same, I end up uninstalling it. It’s probably a me thing, not the editor’s fault, but I don’t care about their AI integration and collaboration features. That’s the great thing about having choices, there’s something for almost everyone out there.