from Hacker News

What's New in Neovim 0.10

by gpanders on 5/16/24, 1:30 PM with 131 comments

  • by azemetre on 5/16/24, 2:52 PM

    When I first started to learn how to program I was following along a basic tutorial by Jeffrey Way and his first sentence was "We're going to use vim."

    That tutorial, whose topic I can't even remember now, set me on a path for my professional career. During 2012-2015 there seemed to be way more competition in the editor space before VS Code gobbled the community mindshare. I remember starting my first professional job and having a coworker to keep pressuring me to use vim because he used emacs and wanted to argue with someone about emacs in the office (all in good fun I assure you :D). I think I started using nvim when 0.2 was release, but then I didn't really do much more with my rc file than what vim offered.

    When neovim enabled plugin authoring with lua that's when it felt like the magic of neovim started to click for me. Plugins like telescope, harpoon, and fzf changed the way I fundamentally work now.

    Although I think my favorite thing about neovim is watching other people use neovim, I'm always learning new workflows to introduce into my workflows. It sounds tiring, but it doesn't feel tiring if that makes sense?

    Really excited to see inlay hints natively as that's something I really struggled to configure myself.

  • by bbkane on 5/16/24, 2:43 PM

    Wow, I love that so much stuff is coming to core!

    Every once in a while for the last few years I overhaul my Neovim config and try to add all the new goodies (commenting, LSP, etc., that are table stakes for most IDEs) as plugins using the latest and greatest plugin manager.

    That works for a while, but like clockwork, something breaks- a plugin updates incompatibly, Neovim updates incompatibly, an external binary the plugin relies on updates incompatibly...

    At this point I'm stuck with a broken IDE and I don't have the energy to debug all the moving parts. I suffer for a month or something and then restart the cycle.

    For my latest config, I decided to treat Neovim and "just a text editor" and made a much smaller config ( https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/nvim-03-lazy ). It's been really nice having something that "just works" for text edits and using VSCode for heavier IDE tasks.

    I WANT to use Neovim for more complex tasks, but I also want a simple config that "just works".

    I'm really excited that the core devs seem to agree and are adding tablestakes features to core- the new default colorscheme, Treesitter WASM, and better commenting will all make my config even simpler!

    At some point I might even try LSP integration again!

  • by durandal1 on 5/16/24, 4:00 PM

    The ultimate proof that Neovim has a healthy team of contributors, is that they successfully agreed on a new default color scheme. I am now convinced they can succeed with anything.

  • by kevincox on 5/16/24, 2:32 PM

    Wow. Almost all of these are things that I will be using right away. It's not often that a release, especially one for software that has lineage back decades, is so relevant to my use cases.

    I already had `K` set to LSP hover.

    I just switched my comment plugin to get something LSP aware.

    Hyperlinks can be a bit annoying. Because sometimes the line wraps so default terminal auto-linking doesn't work properly. Having explicit metadata will be excellent.

    I already had inlay hints enabled, but they would appear at the end of the line. Having these in the right place will be fantastic.

    `gx` open is not something that I was already using but I will probably start using this.

  • by sdwolfz on 5/16/24, 3:15 PM

    "Nvim 0.10 can now use the OSC 52 escape sequence to write to (or read from) the system clipboard."

    This is a big deal! (it shouldn't be, but it is)

    My main complaints about vim/emacs in the past was at the sheer complexity of getting something that should not even be a concern (clipboard integration) working properly, when other text/code editors did not have this problem at all.

    Searching online, it seems like tmux has some nice documentation related to OSC 52 usage:

    https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Clipboard

    I will be playing around with this for a bit to understand it more. But honestly, this is the sort of thing that should "Just Work TM".

    "VTE terminals (GNOME terminal, XFCE terminal, Terminator) do not support the OSC 52 escape sequence."

    https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/2495

    That's a shame, but I'm not against using a different terminal emulator. Up until now I did not really have a good reason to.

  • by yoavm on 5/16/24, 2:41 PM

    Neovim is great and is my daily driver for a couple of years now. I was really looking forward to 0.10 because the roadmap said "multicursor", and that's the only thing that sometimes make me open Sublime Text, but it seems like it was more complex to implement than originally estimated and so it was now pushed to 0.12 (https://neovim.io/roadmap/).

  • by jasonpeacock on 5/16/24, 5:39 PM

    For everyone asking for more IDE features...that's literally a non-goal for Neovim:

    https://neovim.io/charter/

    Neovim aims to be extensible and enable plugins to do amazing things, but also be minimal.

    There are many projects that use the rich set of plugins to provide IDE experiences (LazyVim, AstroNvim, LunarVim, etc).

  • by scutrell on 5/16/24, 4:42 PM

    As a decade long vim user, I just gave nvim a try this year, and I really wanted to like it.

    In most every way it is a straight upgrade, but I find myself kind of bummed out that it is still so barebones on install. Really, I was hoping that something like Lazyvim would be the default because I would love a more "out-of-the-box" solution. I don't want to have to worry about keeping the LSP etc. up to date.

    So instead, I've been looking more into Helix. Still not sold on the bindings, but what you get just by installing it is great.

  • by tiffanyh on 5/16/24, 2:53 PM

    Release Notes (Neovim 0.10):

    https://neovim.io/doc/user/news-0.10.html

  • by lawn on 5/16/24, 2:26 PM

    Q or @ to execute a macro over all visually selected lines is a feature I didn't know about but sounds amazing.

    All too often I create a macro that I want to execute many times, but it's hard to know how many. I've tried the guessing approach but that has a tendency to under- or overestimate.

  • by Affric on 5/16/24, 2:23 PM

    Pretty much exactly what is needed.

    Helix shows the way IMO but the Neovim guys are clearly not conservative.

    Exciting to see the tree sitter and lsp improvements.

  • by ephimetheus on 5/16/24, 3:02 PM

    Support for inlay LSP hints is the big one for me here. That’s mainly what’s kept me from switching over from vim so far.

  • by ilrwbwrkhv on 5/16/24, 3:25 PM

    Fantastic release. The neovim project is one of the best recent projects I have seen. It tries to make things look hot by default instead of trying to look "open source".

  • by phplovesong on 5/17/24, 3:10 AM

    Awesome release! Ditching my colorschemes and going for the default one. Looks like i can drop even more deps like vim-commentary, and i can remove some keybindings that now come as default!

    Neovim keeps getting better and better!

  • by v3ss0n on 5/16/24, 2:27 PM

    We need proper Neovim gui that is officially maintained

  • by xyst on 5/16/24, 3:04 PM

    I have been transitioning my workflow from macOS to Linux. Discovered it’s kind of pain in the ass to get a gui based editor like Intellij to work correctly, especially within a VM.

    Happened to have discovered neovim, and so far it’s been a delight to use. Much faster and much lighter on resource use.

    Do any neovim veterans have recommendations on plugins to enable? Or even hidden features that would improve workflow.

  • by jarbus on 5/16/24, 3:56 PM

    Love neovim, great to see more parts already in my config coming to core. Maybe one day most of us won't even bother with plug-ins :)

  • by laktak on 5/16/24, 2:56 PM

    I tried to switch to nvim but quickly discovered that there are breaking changes that just don't work for me, like system() not being interactive and having to use term.

    nvim might be great for some but it's not a vim replacement, it's a different editor with different drawbacks.

  • by morning4coffe on 5/16/24, 3:39 PM

    Exciting to see Neovim 0.10 bringing so many core features! And although I don't use it daily now, I believe it's a game-changer for many. Kudos to the team for keeping it evolving!

  • by xutopia on 5/16/24, 2:28 PM

    I love seeing the development of an amazing modern replacement for Vim. I look forward to the moment where it has tons of plugins that are as easy to install as VSCode extensions are.

  • by edvards on 5/16/24, 2:55 PM

    Am I the only one who doesn't like the new color scheme that much? It seems that it just plainly removes all the syntax highlighting more or less.

  • by nallerooth on 5/16/24, 3:11 PM

    This sounds like a really awesome release, well done!

  • by vander_elst on 5/16/24, 6:11 PM

    Every ~6 months I try to switch from vim to nvim, but somehow it never sticks. Not sure why but in my use cases it is slower than vim, the terminal is imo still worse than vim and it s harder to copy and paste to the terminal: in vim I yank and than C_W"0 (or whatever register I need) in nvim I didn't find a solution yet. Nvim always feels more clunky.

  • by LeSaucy on 5/16/24, 2:18 PM

    I am curious if any of the termsync options can make neovim play nicely with mosh. My dream setup is to be able to spin up preconfigured dev environments in docker containers, and use blink shell on my iPad for on the go coding. Unfortunately mosh and neovim always end up with display corruption.

  • by fh9302 on 5/16/24, 3:02 PM

    For some reason vim-airline in combination with neovim 0.10 has really bad performance when scrolling large files. This doesn't happen with neovim 0.9 and regular vim.

  • by AltruisticGapHN on 5/16/24, 4:25 PM

    Is there a modern equivalent of MacVim on Linux ? Gvim is OK though the Ux (tabs etc) looks dated.

  • by quux on 5/16/24, 4:36 PM

    LSP inlay hints is so nice. Instant upgrade just for that :D

  • by xbar on 5/16/24, 3:03 PM

    Thank you Mr. Anders.