I've been a pretty big vim fan for most of my programming career. I've always liked how good it was at doing one thing well, editing. However, I feel as though a few things are happening to it; specifically, more and more people are joining the community, expecting VS-code-like features from their editor. Few people are really interested in the Unix philosophy that made vim such a powerful tool to begin with.
I've been looking at a few alternatives: 1. nvim - Attempts to rewrite vim bug-for-bug. I've been using this for a while, but it still has problems with people trying to force it to do things it really shouldn't do. 2. vis - This is a new favorite. This mixes vi(m) modality and sam/acme regex. Cool stuff 3. vi - I've been looking at using this as a daily driver. However, I enjoy syntax highlighting and easy configuration, which vi doesn't really have. 4. kakoune - A total redesign of vim, with less emphasis on cutting bloat and more on adding features/redefining features. Cool ideas in there though.
There is nothing wrong with using plug-ins. netrw is comfy, spelling is a nice add. Embrace the bloat, begin with making the perfect statusline plug-in. Even downloading others' plug-ins isn't something to be ashamed of, some are just good for your use case and not worth rewriting.
The idea of plug-ins is to be "little" scripts which focus on adding one feature. Keep away from these "all-in-one Vim IDE expansions" and it's all good.
Aiden Turner
only applies if you were talking about plug-ins when talking about "not very unix-y"
Isaac Evans
< What did he mean by this?
< github.com/tpope/vim-vinegar/issues/21#issuecomment-39447112 Netrw is filled with bugs and is pretty unreliable. The worst part about it is that even if netrw was a fine piece of software, I ``have`` to use it because It's packaged with vim. The new-age-vim way of doing things seems to be downloading a 300KB .vim file that totally replaces something vim has implemented poorly in 1995. Most plugins aren't autistic unix-y enough either (only work with one tool, forces settings, etc.)
Benjamin Long
cuckchan is four doors down
Connor Kelly
It's emacs+evil mode for me.
Cooper Taylor
can you give some examples? Most of the plug-ins seem to be either a straight clone of a built-in plug-in, or add something Vim doesn't have at all. For example: autocompletion is really good in Vim, just need to setup stuff like omnicompletion. It's more portable and less resource heavy to change some settings over installing a plug-in mimicking built-in completion functions.
For netrw, I agree, it isn't suited for more than basic browsing. Why need to use those tho? Vim has ex commands for changing file structure. For basic browsing, netrw is comfy. For other stuff, I use commands anyway. I heard NERDTree is really good, if you're interested in an alternative.
Benjamin Phillips
autocomplete is a decent example of something implemented (pretty) poorly. It's better than nothing and what I've been using for quite a while, but it has little (real) language support and can't understand anything beyond the base language, which is generally what I know already.