[bryphe]

Author here - that's a great question on VSCode. I actually tried really hard to get my 'Vim workflow' to work with VSCode - even creating a plugin for relative numbering. I'm a big fan of the work that the VSCodeVim / VSCodeNeovim teams are doing as well!

There were two challenges I faced:

1. Performance - I'm very sensitive to typing latency. I wanted to leverage Neovim to its full potential. IMO, there is a tremendous benefit to having the buffer management delegated to a native layer (similiar to what the Atom team is exploring with Xray). We also use a canvas renderer for the editor surface, unlike VSCode/Atom which use the DOM. We still have low-hanging fruit to address in terms of performance, but we gain significant benefits from this architecture, vs other electron apps.

2. Functionality- I wanted to explore some new input methods, inspired by browser plugins like Vimium and cVim. I also wanted to explore ways to gamify the editor experience and make it fun to learn modal editing and become more productive. I found VSCode's API's limiting in these aspects, and wasn't able to realize it within the confines of their API.

I believe VSCode is making the right set of trade-offs for their user base - there is benefit to the sandboxing of the APIs as it helps lift the overall quality of plugins. Every editor is a different exercise in trade-offs, and I wanted to explore a different set, targeting a more niche group.

The VSCode team has done awesome work and we've been able to leverage several core components - their language server client, their snippet parser, their textmate highlighting parser / engine. It's wonderful that they are contributing so much to the open source community. I hope to hook up their debug adapter protocol in the near term, too!

To answer your second question - we'd like to support VSCode plugins at some point. They have a great ecosystem of plugins. We support their snippet syntax and textmate highlighting syntax, but hopefully we can have more a complete compatibility story. Still have a lot of work to do on our plugin story in general :)

[ziikutv]

Thanks for a response. I just installed it and do think that it is missing a few features that are important to me (as in, these are my opinions):

1. Syntax (missing for Elixir)

2. Shortcuts (even preferences shortcut is missing)

3. Easier configuration API; I think currently, you give us the "entire React app", rather get something simple.

I have the application downloaded; assuming you have autoupdates. I will keep an eye out; excited to see where this goes.

[djur]

For 1, there's https://github.com/elixir-editors/vim-elixir.

[ziikutv]

Is that compatible with the editor OP is talking about? To clarify, that’s what above feedback was for. I don’t understand why people downvote comments without even knowing the context of the conversation.

[badosu]

I did not downvote you but here are some possible reasons:

1. If you're coming from regular vim you should expect having to bundle syntax files for languages that aren't hugely popular.

2. Shortcuts on a vim frontend should be pretty self-evident for a regular vim user. And some reading on the documentation as well until the 1.0 release.

3. This is a good point, but you did not clarify your point well as I assume you meant discoverability and ease-of-use of configuration.

Still, I think it's valuable feedback and actually captures some issues that are being worked now:

1. People coming from IDEs expect everything to work out-of-box and perhaps in the future some plugins will be bundled by default (configurable to not be the case for veteran users).

2. Recently a lot of features out of regular vim were added such as markdown preview, browser tab, file explorer and sneak mode; which have particular keybindings. For the moment they should be visible when you run the 'Quick Open' menu (`<c-p>`) but seems like there should be another way to discover these. An issue will be opened for this case.

3. Discoverability of options and configuration UI is a current issue indeed and there are plans to improve it (https://github.com/onivim/oni/issues/976).

I hope the downvotes do not discourage you from giving further feedback as it's best when given sincerely, issues are very welcome, thanks!

[djur]

Yes, Oni is just an alternate frontend for vim and is compatible with Vim plugins (instructions here: https://github.com/onivim/oni/wiki/Plugins#installing-a-vim-...). I don't think there was anything wrong with your comment that merited downvotes.