Brushing over teco feels a bit .. odd given its role in Emacs but this is the vim family story.
Dec 10 had SOS which was an ed-like line editor. And a port of qed IIRC. It had a concept of a viewport into a file with lines longer than 80 chars, other editors did folding but this one did scrolling in ascii. Emacs now does similar. Gosling Emacs was nice before gnu. Very simple cross file macro "do this sequence of commands" mode. Vi/ex used buffers and @execute to write programs the gosling Emacs was more "do it once then ask the editor to redo it again and again"
Nvi and Keith Bostic deserves telling too. Kind of died
Midstream getting i8n and sub Windows fitted in.
The ed/sed/grep/awk unity over the syntax of the regex cannot be overstated. One investment in a syntax which embodied semantic intent in pattern match. The uplift into ex/vi was a no brainer.
Yes, I could have been more equitable for sure. Maybe I can do a better Emacs deep-dive someday.
I'll have to also look up SOS— thanks for mentioning! Haven't heard of Nvi, but that looks interesting. Thanks for sharing those. I'll have to make some edits to the post. I keep getting good add-ins like that. Love learning more about this stuff.
AstroNvim was love at first sight for me a couple weeks ago. The AstroCommunity Rust pack gave me a super robust Rust development environment with literally just a couple minutes of setup. But as mentioned, I've only been using it for a couple weeks at this point. https://astronvim.com/
Just trowing out another similar, LazyVim[1]. I tried different neovim and emacs configurations over few years until stumbling on LazyVim and have been really happy with it for quite a while now - everything works out of the box, easy to add stuff and reasonably good documentation.
LazyVim wasn't even around when I first tried Neovim. Knowing what I know now, this would definitely be my distro of choice. The maintainer, Folke, is an incredible programmer and has made many of the most popular plugins used by the community.
I've been using AstroVim for a couple months, LunarVim before that; switched because they stopped maintaining Lunar. I had been carrying some vimrc files around for decades before that and got tired of having a partially working set of the more advance features.
With these packages, keeping as stock as I could stand, I've got a great set of LSP and advanced editing features with minimal effort. It's been great.
I started from Vim and ended up migrating my dotfiles to Lua. I was really glad when I bit the bullet because I was able to keep most of my favorite functionality but start using more of the modern Lua-base plugins. Lazy.nvim is a really great package manager— super simple.
I ended up stealing some LSP config from AstroNvim or another Nvim "distro". I've never tried committing to one of those prebuilds though. I was always hacking at my own configs. I do like to skim some of the code though because they are generally implementing much better design patterns. I'm sure that the community will do a better job than me with Lua 9/10...
The obsessive dotfile management does help to give you a deep understanding of your editor though— I will say that.
I've now watched people go from Sublime to Atom to VSCode to Cursor. Truly it's wild how much value I've gotten out of sticking with just Vim and occasionally trimming my config.
I have no desire to move to Neovim. The Neovim community seems hell bent on turning Vim into another Emacs kitchen sink style ecosystem where no one values moderation and everyone is installing 100+ plugins they don't need. I haven't seen a single Neovim feature that actually helps me get work done more efficiently than how I already do it with Vim. Neovim feels like the first step since ed where the lineage has truly gone in the wrong direction.
I am still on (mac)vim but I think Neovim did at least two things right
1. it made async operations normal (Vim later did it too) which made things like lint-on-save much better
2. lua is better than vimscript which means easier plugin development. This in turn means it's more likely someone makes a plugin for neovim than for vim these days (e.g. newer completion/llm integrations exist for neovim which don't exist for vim)
I don't think "people installing 100 plugins" is a problem with neovim per se, people were installing tons of plugins before too, and "distributions" such as Janus existed before.
There were always a big group of people who were obsessed about configs and plug-ins. My impression is that once NeoVim appeared all of them moved from Vim to NeoVim so that's why we have the impression about NeoVim being turned into Emacs.
Personally I use almost stock NeoVim (~30 lines config, with 2 tiny plugins, one of which I wrote myself). I find NeoVim to be very close to Vim, but with a few better corners. Things that I like are things like default `gc` operator for commenting and uncommenting portions of code.
"The Neovim community seems hell bent on turning Vim into another Emacs kitchen sink style ecosystem"
Not all of Neovim users do that, I think. My setup is pretty minimalist, other than basic requirements like syntax highlighting, linter... I have no desire to turn it into full-blown IDE like VS or IntelliJ. So no Astrovim, NVChar, Lunarvim etc etc. Just plain neovim. Actually that's the same way I setup vim. Both nvim and vim which shares the same config.
Brushing over teco feels a bit .. odd given its role in Emacs but this is the vim family story.
Dec 10 had SOS which was an ed-like line editor. And a port of qed IIRC. It had a concept of a viewport into a file with lines longer than 80 chars, other editors did folding but this one did scrolling in ascii. Emacs now does similar. Gosling Emacs was nice before gnu. Very simple cross file macro "do this sequence of commands" mode. Vi/ex used buffers and @execute to write programs the gosling Emacs was more "do it once then ask the editor to redo it again and again"
Nvi and Keith Bostic deserves telling too. Kind of died Midstream getting i8n and sub Windows fitted in.
The ed/sed/grep/awk unity over the syntax of the regex cannot be overstated. One investment in a syntax which embodied semantic intent in pattern match. The uplift into ex/vi was a no brainer.
Yes, I could have been more equitable for sure. Maybe I can do a better Emacs deep-dive someday.
I'll have to also look up SOS— thanks for mentioning! Haven't heard of Nvi, but that looks interesting. Thanks for sharing those. I'll have to make some edits to the post. I keep getting good add-ins like that. Love learning more about this stuff.
AstroNvim was love at first sight for me a couple weeks ago. The AstroCommunity Rust pack gave me a super robust Rust development environment with literally just a couple minutes of setup. But as mentioned, I've only been using it for a couple weeks at this point. https://astronvim.com/
Just trowing out another similar, LazyVim[1]. I tried different neovim and emacs configurations over few years until stumbling on LazyVim and have been really happy with it for quite a while now - everything works out of the box, easy to add stuff and reasonably good documentation.
[1] http://www.lazyvim.org/
LazyVim wasn't even around when I first tried Neovim. Knowing what I know now, this would definitely be my distro of choice. The maintainer, Folke, is an incredible programmer and has made many of the most popular plugins used by the community.
I've been using AstroVim for a couple months, LunarVim before that; switched because they stopped maintaining Lunar. I had been carrying some vimrc files around for decades before that and got tired of having a partially working set of the more advance features.
With these packages, keeping as stock as I could stand, I've got a great set of LSP and advanced editing features with minimal effort. It's been great.
I've also got helix set up with the LSP settings.
I started from Vim and ended up migrating my dotfiles to Lua. I was really glad when I bit the bullet because I was able to keep most of my favorite functionality but start using more of the modern Lua-base plugins. Lazy.nvim is a really great package manager— super simple.
I ended up stealing some LSP config from AstroNvim or another Nvim "distro". I've never tried committing to one of those prebuilds though. I was always hacking at my own configs. I do like to skim some of the code though because they are generally implementing much better design patterns. I'm sure that the community will do a better job than me with Lua 9/10...
The obsessive dotfile management does help to give you a deep understanding of your editor though— I will say that.
I've now watched people go from Sublime to Atom to VSCode to Cursor. Truly it's wild how much value I've gotten out of sticking with just Vim and occasionally trimming my config.
I have no desire to move to Neovim. The Neovim community seems hell bent on turning Vim into another Emacs kitchen sink style ecosystem where no one values moderation and everyone is installing 100+ plugins they don't need. I haven't seen a single Neovim feature that actually helps me get work done more efficiently than how I already do it with Vim. Neovim feels like the first step since ed where the lineage has truly gone in the wrong direction.
I am still on (mac)vim but I think Neovim did at least two things right
1. it made async operations normal (Vim later did it too) which made things like lint-on-save much better
2. lua is better than vimscript which means easier plugin development. This in turn means it's more likely someone makes a plugin for neovim than for vim these days (e.g. newer completion/llm integrations exist for neovim which don't exist for vim)
I don't think "people installing 100 plugins" is a problem with neovim per se, people were installing tons of plugins before too, and "distributions" such as Janus existed before.
There were always a big group of people who were obsessed about configs and plug-ins. My impression is that once NeoVim appeared all of them moved from Vim to NeoVim so that's why we have the impression about NeoVim being turned into Emacs.
Personally I use almost stock NeoVim (~30 lines config, with 2 tiny plugins, one of which I wrote myself). I find NeoVim to be very close to Vim, but with a few better corners. Things that I like are things like default `gc` operator for commenting and uncommenting portions of code.
"The Neovim community seems hell bent on turning Vim into another Emacs kitchen sink style ecosystem"
Not all of Neovim users do that, I think. My setup is pretty minimalist, other than basic requirements like syntax highlighting, linter... I have no desire to turn it into full-blown IDE like VS or IntelliJ. So no Astrovim, NVChar, Lunarvim etc etc. Just plain neovim. Actually that's the same way I setup vim. Both nvim and vim which shares the same config.
> I haven't seen a single Neovim feature that actually helps me get work done more efficiently than how I already do it with Vim.
I feel that Neovims implementation of LSP and Treesitter is better than in Vim, and Lua is a magnitude better than Vimscript.
When I was small, my dad would bring home a terminal with a thermal printer and acoustic coupler modem. This would have been mid-1970's.
I remember QED. I suppose it was my first editor.
That is really rad :) I don't have any core memories with thermal printer output, but my dad did play pong with us on his commodore 64.
I've been using anvil. A modern acme inspired editor.
At first I thought you were making a joke. Like I'm a caveman, my editor is an anvil. Now I'm curious. Will check this one out.
https://anvil-editor.net/