Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chongli 2803 days ago
Vimscript was a mistake, if you ask me. The power of vi is its edit commands and the ability to bang text through shell commands. A very careful, considered expansion of a few features in vi to improve its integration with outside script interpreters (Perl, Python, etc.) as well as language servers could've produced an extremely compelling editor.

As it is, I've found that you can do a lot with just vi, tmux, and bash (along with all of the utilities).
1 comments
pault 2803 days ago
> A very careful, considered expansion of a few features in vi to improve its integration with outside script interpreters (Perl, Python, etc.) as well as language servers could've produced an extremely compelling editor.

Isn't this what neovim is for?

link
chongli 2803 days ago
No, neovim is still the same concept: you're scripting the editor. It's still this gargantuan thing with all of these things you bolt on and reams of documentation to wade through. It still has the vim philosophy (which is the same as the Emacs philosophy, only not as good): my editor is an operating system and I want to rewrite all of my software to run inside of it.

I'm thinking of something altogether different: you leave the editor alone and you script the operating system around it, using the editor only as a flexible control interface for everything. This is the original vi philosophy. It means you don't have to rewrite anything. Any new program you install, if it can send/receive text on STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR, then you can use it in vi.

So what's wrong with vi? It has a few shortcomings: no unlimited undo, no ability to pass the cursor (row,col) position to an external command, and working with multiple buffers is more painful than it needs to be.

link
justinmk 2803 days ago
> This is the original vi philosophy. It means you don't have to rewrite anything.

Users will need to rewrite many things, if they use multiple platforms.

> Any new program you install, if it can send/receive text on STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR, then you can use it in vi.

Except even the unix toolspace is not cross-platform, despite POSIX.

Minimalism is good, but the OSes failed to provide good, composable, cross-platform tools.

By the way, Neovim's :terminal command enables more scripting and re-use of the many unix tools. w3m and lynx are much more useful if you can overlay editor keybindings over them instead of writing a pile of code to use their (insufficient) CLI APIs.

link