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by ash-ali 416 days ago
One of the biggest problems i have with running basic text editors like vim/nvim is the investment time to spin up a fully loaded workable development env; esp since i've never done it before. basic vim with some modifications in .vimrc is all i have and i know some of my colleagues are also this way!

nowadays though i really want to use LLMs to write code for me instead of switching contexts on different platforms. can i ask what you use for LLM stuff on nvim? how do you like it compared to running bare bones vim and switching platforms?

1 comments

Github copilot has an official [1] neovim extension. There are also third-party plugins for Copilot, Chat, Next edit etc.

[1] https://github.com/github/copilot.vim

It works with vanilla vim (and MacVim) these days too. "Vim 9.0.0185 or newer" is mentioned in the Getting Started section.

I was about to install it a couple of years ago, but then started thinking about the privacy threat model.

I realized that having a "copilot" in my everyday editor (not just for public open source coding!) is never gonna fly. I may end up accidentally uploading any file I open to a 3rd party for tab completion and "AI stuff". Even if I can configure it to hopefully ignore some directories, too risky for me. With a separate editor just for coding (Zed in my case), the risk of accidentally opening and uploading a wrong file would be much lower for me, as I'll keep using vim without any AI for everything other than OSS coding.

Edit: I'm sure there's an option only manually load the copilot plugin when you explicitly want it, but it still makes me too uneasy.

How hard would it be to have an editor just ignore files that aren't in source control (at least staged)?