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Discussion on: Exploring Vim

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

[Neovim] comes out of the box with more sensible defaults and an integrated terminal

People often pitch this as a reason to use neovim. Vim also comes with an integrated terminal (well, it depends which options your version was built with) and has for a while. When neovim evangelists say it has a terminal it's a bit like BMW fans saying that their car is better than your Ford because it comes with seats.

As far as sensible defaults go, that's a whole can of worms. An awful lot of people disagree with anyone else's idea of "sensible"...

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kungtotte profile image
Thomas Landin

NeoVim does come with a sensible scripting language though :)

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vintharas profile image
Jaime González García

Hi Ben! Than you for the comment!

I have to admit I don't have a strong opinion here but I do think that neovim defaults are sensible and provide a nicer first-time user experience to the alternative. Particularly:

  • Syntax highlighting is enabled by default
  • ":filetype plugin indent on" is enabled by default
  • 'autoindent' is set by default
  • 'autoread' is set by default
  • 'hlsearch' is set by default
  • 'incsearch' is set by default
  • 'nocompatible' is always set
  • 'showcmd' is set by default
  • 'smarttab' is set by default
  • 'wildmenu' is set by default

Also, their effort to allow other programming communities to write plugins using languages such as lua, python, ruby and JavaScript/TypeScript is also very interesting and cool.

In regards to the terminal, I'm using nvim/vim with tmux so I haven't found a strong use case yet for the integrated terminal (just haven't had the time to dive in there yet )

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

Yeah, I used the built-in terminal out of curiosity a couple of times but stopped pretty quickly - I don't really see the point apart from for yanking lines out and I'm more likely to use r! to get shell content in anyway.