13 ms·

Onivim 2 is a retro-futuristic modal editor

190 points by niedzielski 5y ago

a3w 5y ago
Buying software without a trial makes me disinterested. I still want to learn using vim every day, but won't commit to this text editor/vsx-powered IDE, unless I find out that I have the guts to use it every day. Also, there is VIM mode for VS Code, I guess.
- injidup 5y ago
  Hand holding is still a thing here I guess. https://onivim.github.io/docs/for-developers/building https://onivim.github.io/docs/for-developers/building
  - toastal 5y ago
    It's pretty nice to see such beginner-friendly documentation tbh.
- gryn 5y ago
  it seems to be open source there's a link in the page to the project's GitHub page. https://github.com/onivim/oni2 https://github.com/onivim/oni2
  - mdaniel 5y ago
    Pedantically, I believe it's closer to "source available" than open source, since their license specifically adds a lot of restrictions on the end user
- ddek 5y ago
  > Also, there is VIM mode for VS Code, I guess. I feel like this is something said by people who are more invested in VS Code than vim. The main vim plugin for VS Code is straight trash.* It's slow, buggy, and unintuitive; while lacking the extensibility that vim has. At least IDEAVim, which has the same limitations of being built in another IDE, replicates enough of the common plugins to be pleasant. It's also worth noting that onivim is not VS Code repackaged. It is not an electron app, and it doesn't appear to use the monaco editor. They have apparently taken great design inspiration from VS Code, which I think is a fairly diffident decision. Overall, I'm looking at neovim nightly and not knowing why onivim is a thing. I can understand the appeal of a GUI vim, but implementing a vim backend is a monumental task if you intend to be compatible with existing vim plugins (and you should). Nvim 0.5 has native lua, and now freed from vimscript the quality of plugins is improving continuously. I just can't see a way for a 'third vim' - if you don't start with vimscript you won't be compatible, but if you do you're already outdated. * There are a few attempts to splice VS Code and neovim, all of these are awful.
  - WiiManic 5y ago
    > but implementing a vim backend is a monumental task if you intend to be compatible with existing vim plugins We skipped that and haven't implemented any vim backend at all! We use/made libvim[1], which is just the vim source, that we've essentially turned into a library. So its the vim code base with terminal UI stuff stripped out, and an interface added for us to hook into it. The README of that repo has some good insight into that (including why we didn't use neovim here, as much as the team all loves nvim). We don't support vimscript stuff at the moment, but its in progress as all the vim source code is there to load/run it as normal, its just about integrating is properly into Oni2 (making sure keybinds are working, commands are properly loaded, packing stuff up nicely for distrib etc). (There is some other motivation bits in this doc[2]. Its outdated since we haven't edited it since before the project started, but it outlines the motivations we went in with etc). [1]: https://github.com/onivim/libvim https://github.com/onivim/libvim [2]: https://github.com/onivim/oni2/blob/master/docs/MOTIVATION.md https://github.com/onivim/oni2/blob/master/docs/MOTIVATION.m...
    - jnovek 5y ago
      “We skipped that and haven't implemented any vim backend at all ... so its the vim code base with terminal UI stuff stripped out, and an interface added for us to hook into it.” You took out the most important part! I don’t know about other people, but I became a vim user because I found myself configuring servers and needed to know a better text editor than nano. Vim is also my primary code editor these days but portability is still a killer feature.
      - lbotos 5y ago
        You are mis-interpreting what they did. They literally took vim, and built a ui around it. No re-implementation. It's Vim with a more modern frontend stack. You can go look at the libvim source and see it for yourself. The point of this is to bring Vim into more modern workflows, not but "vim compat" but literally... vim. Source: had some pull requests into libvim a while back to remove a lot of the various legacy compat features that don't make sense for libvim.
    - 5y ago
- WiiManic 5y ago
  Oni2 is available for use for free for non-commercial usage, it just needs building from source at the moment. The steps are in the user manual if anyone is interested: https://onivim.github.io/docs/for-developers/building https://onivim.github.io/docs/for-developers/building Partially that is a thank you to those who have supported our development, and partially its to help put up a small barrier to entry, just so we don't get too flooded with issues and feature requests! A public release is coming soon-ish, and can be used for non-commercial use.
  - lasagnaphil 5y ago
    I found that it was incredibly painstaking to build though, it's quite a barrier. I wanted to try it out a bit before buying, but it seemed to consume a considerable amount of disk space (>20GB), along with downloading tons of NPM dependencies and giving out weird errors during building. Is there a particular reason why do you need such an amount of dependencies for building an editor?
- rapind 5y ago
  According to their FAQ it looks like they'll be offering a trial version once they hit v1. https://onivim.github.io/docs/other/faq#is-there-a-trial-version https://onivim.github.io/docs/other/faq#is-there-a-trial-ver...
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  I use the vim mode for VS: Code as my daily driver, and unlike the one sibling comment, don't think it sucks. I still purchased an Onivim 2 license. It's not far along enough for me to use daily yet, or at least, it wasn't last time I tried it out and I haven't had the time to look again, but I am excited for when it is. That said, when I did this it was a one-time cost, and it looks like now it's a Patreon thing. Still though, $10 is pretty cheap, and if you hate it, you can always cancel. Or at least, that's how I think about these things these days. Not everyone has $10 to spare on stuff like this, but I am fortunate to.
pope_meat 5y ago
I stared at the landing page for a good 15 seconds wondering "why is that picture... breathing?"
- pantulis 5y ago
  Same here!
- cobertos 5y ago
  It made it so much hard to just take in and understand the UI. Glad I'm not the only one that felt that way.
  - spondyl 5y ago
    The animation up and down causes blurriness on my monitor, presumably from aliasing or something
  - jamesrcole 5y ago
    Someone had to make the conscious choice to make it do that, then add the code for it — I’d love to know what their rationale was. I find it difficult to imagine how they thought it’d make things better, and how they could have missed the downsides of it. I think it’s something they really should fix, because it screams “poor judgment”, which gives a bad first impression of their work.
- bryanphe 5y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! I removed the animation... hopefully not as jarring now.
enw 5y ago
Isn’t this VS Code with the Vim extension?
- felixr 5y ago
  No, it is actually using the real vim in the background. So while you might not be able to use all vim plugins/scripts, it should give you a much more complete vim experience. See also https://github.com/onivim/libvim https://github.com/onivim/libvim
  - e12e 5y ago
    Is it better than (the AFAIK newer) https://github.com/asvetliakov/vscode-neovim https://github.com/asvetliakov/vscode-neovim ?
- ddek 5y ago
  No, likely out of diffidence onivim has a very similar design to VSC. It doesn't appear to share any code with VS Code though.
  - WiiManic 5y ago
    This isn't technically true, the extension host we use is directly the one from VSCode, such that we can support their extensions (well...a subset as we fill in the gaps in for the Oni2 <-> ExtHost communication). But the actual core editor is all seperate, written in ReasonML (or OCaml if you know that instead), with a bunch of C libs in the background we've wrapped (Skia/Harfbuzz/We wrap real vim etc). So the core editing experience has no code sharing, but the extension side of things does!
- trutannus 5y ago
  Took far too long for me to figure out that this isn't just a VS Code extension. I'm not even entirely sure this isn't.
- hvis 5y ago
  Seems like it's Vim with a VS Code extension/adapter instead. Intriguing idea, though not sure how viable.
skavi 5y ago
How fast does this feel compared to VS Code? I went into the whole onivim -> revery -> reason rabbit hole and the native code compilation is compelling, but Flutter does the same thing and is pretty slow.
- xaduha 5y ago
  It feels faster than VSCode, but I would wait until at least 0.6 before trying it out more.
- mesaframe 5y ago
  I tried it and it's buttery smooth. Feels like notepad.
- cassepipe 5y ago
  Startup time is almost instantaneous. It's very responsive and works well on an old machine with only 4Go Ram. Not ready to abandon the terminal yet but if I ever do, this will be my choice.
da_big_ghey 5y ago
«retro-futuristic modal editor» not helpful for marketing, what is the meaning here? maybe some correlation with «outrun labs» name and outrun look, but not clear. it also has advertisement for «native code» but this not always means fast. text editor problem is more latency than «speed», any latency benchmark made yet?
deleted 5y ago
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phelipetls 5y ago
It's unfortunate that some VS Code extensions, e.g. remote development extensions, can't be used in Onivim 2 due to license restrictions[1]. [1]: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/196#issuecomment-523012854 https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/196#issuecomment...
- JonathonW 5y ago
  Can any VS Code extensions be used in Onivim 2? Despite appearances, Onivim isn't a VS Code fork, it doesn't use Electron, and it's not written in Javascript-- it just happens to take substantial inspiration from VS Code's UI.
  - zargon 5y ago
    > Can any VS Code extensions be used in Onivim 2? Yes, this is basically the entire point of Onivim (use vscode extensions with vim). https://open-vsx.org/ https://open-vsx.org/
  - WiiManic 5y ago
    We host the VSCode extension host, which is how Oni2 can use VSCode extensions. I.e, the whole front end and core editor is native code (ReasonML/C), and then there is a nicely typed interface where we communicate with a node instance to run VSCode extensions. We broadly end up with Oni2 <-> Ext Host <-> Extension. We have to implement the Oni2 side for each thing, so parse the message sent, and how to action on that and render it, but it lets us run VSCode extensions, still in a native editor. There are some caveats, like the license issue mentioned, the largest being that extensions that heavily depend on rendering custom components / web pages aren't possible, just since Revery has no browser etc to render anything like that with. We've focused on language ones to start though, and that has meant we support a decent selection of langauges as adding one feature unblocks loads of extensions.
nine_k 5y ago
What's most interesting for me here is Revery, the GUI framework. React-like, cross-platform, native-code, MIT-licensed. Yes, it's not using native widgets (so no built-in accessibility), but that might be fine in many cases.
- romwell 5y ago
  Looking forward to seeing it displace Electron.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    Not soon: however I like ML-style languages, it's JS / TS what has the mass market adoption now. It's not even the language, it's not much harder to learn than TS. It's the smaller library ecosystem of Reason / OCaml.
    - toastal 5y ago
      But they get a simpler, sounder type system in OCaml as a result which should make maintenance easier for them. Given that they want this style of programming the ergonomics should be a lot easier than TypeScript as well.
  - k__ 5y ago
    Back in the days, I would have bet on Revery as Electron replacement. But currently, Tauri seems like a more viable option.
- zbaylin 5y ago
  I’ve actually been working on adding more support for native widgets in Revery, mostly focusing on macOS since thats my daily OS, but Windows too. You can now use native buttons and menus, and I’m looking into adding other native inputs (like text fields).
  - nine_k 5y ago
    This is great news. Native text inputs have a lot of important affordances like navigation keys, selection, and spelling.
dasdadjak 5y ago
Was an early adopter in 2019, right now not so much. No proper channel distributions, no hidpi support, UI clone/copy/paste of vscode - all things which actually makes user sad... After all going in the wrong direction, sorry.
ford_o 5y ago
Why does it try to look like vscode clone? I understand that the vscode ecosystem is awesome. However, I always felt like the UI was severaly lacking behind proper IDE like intellij. Give me intellij-like documentation popup, run, build & debug buttons and debug UI, and I will switch in an instant!
- jevgeni 5y ago
  This is what irked me about it. We already have VS Code. For me the defaults there are tolerable, but not the pinnacle of ergonomics.
- zbaylin 5y ago
  Hey, Onivim contributor here. Unfortunately none of the main contributors are designers. I think we end up with a very VSCode-similar look because in terms of UX that’s our main inspiration. We do diverge in some areas, though. Debug functionality is on our radar and it will hopefully be in relatively soon!
  - inside_out_life 5y ago
    look at something like Obsidian for modern editor UX
siproprio 5y ago
Does it really have INSTANT startup time (i.e. Sublime Text)? If it has, I'm interested. Was not able to find the trial though.
- xaduha 5y ago
  $ time /opt/oni/Onivim2.AppDir/usr/bin/Oni2 --nofork --silent -c qa real 0m0,360s user 0m0,280s sys 0m0,042s
- pharke 5y ago
  Yes, the startup time is amazing. You can build from source if you want to try it out without paying. I bought a license and I've been using it on and off for personal projects but it is still in development so don't expect everything to be perfect. Still really good though, actually feels like (is) Vim with a modern UI.
  - lasagnaphil 5y ago
    Though it's incredibly painstaking to do a source build; at least in my Arch setup it needed about 20GB of disk space and a lot of time and patience (it needs the Ocaml compiler and also downloads a ton of NPM dependencies!!!), and the PKGBUILD script failed due to a reason I've yet to figure out. I was thinking about trying out Onivim someday but this one thing was the whole dealbreaker. I thought that if your program is advertised to be light and fast it would also be easy to build, but welp that's unfortunately not the case.
    - vimacs2 5y ago
      > I was thinking about trying out Onivim someday but this one thing was the whole dealbreaker. I thought that if your program is advertised to be light and fast it would also be easy to build, but welp that's unfortunately not the case. This is not really a reasonable expectation to have for non-free software. The software is made for those willing to pay the licensing fee to download a prebuilt binary, not those that will end up wanting to compile it themselves. Fast performance != fast build times. I personally appreciate the fact that the source is even provided - though obviously with a non free license.
albingroen 5y ago
I bought a license like 6 months ago and have tried a couple of times back and forth during this period. I thought this was exactly what I was looking for. A modern mix on Vim and VSCode. I was pretty disappointed though tbh. You can really just VSCode with the Vim extension, or just use actual Vim. I think there is space for a product like this though, so A for effort!
- JNRowe 5y ago
  Much like you, I think I'm probably the target audience for this. One of the things that stops me from using neovim - regardless of any changes I'd like - is the removal of gvim. I like my gvim candy; SVG icons in sign columns, better modifier support in maps, drag and drop when in command line, $things_ive_forgot_i_use. Likewise, I also believe the idea of onivim is worth a licence fee, even it turns out I can't get behind it. It just feels like one of those projects I want to see succeed, even if it isn't for me.
  - atweiden 5y ago
    Onivim has a high chance of becoming the best heavyweight GUI Vim IDE distribution over the coming years. I bought a once-off lifetime commercial license a good while ago and now get nightly updates. I wish the team all the success in the world.
  - xvilka 5y ago
    There are external NeoVim GUIs though, for example Neovide[1]. [1] https://github.com/Kethku/neovide https://github.com/Kethku/neovide
    - JNRowe 5y ago
      Yeah, I've tried a few. I can't quite put my finger on what is wrong, but the ones I've tried just don't feel right. gnvim¹ was the most usable for me. However, it isn't without problems for my use case. To use my earlier example, switching would mean patching fonts or using overrides in fonts.conf to fake the use of icons in signs. I did take another look just now², and there a few more for me to try out ;) ¹ https://github.com/vhakulinen/gnvim https://github.com/vhakulinen/gnvim ² https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects
koehr 5y ago
Honestly, melting two open source editors together (or rather cloning one while integrating the other) and ask for that amount of money for it is in my opinion unacceptable. The only thing that would make this a bit more acceptable is when the developers are promising to spend a lot of their earnings for vim development (and maybe VSCode, too). *edit:* Just saw that it is actually open source and will be available for non-commercial use for free. I'm more than fine with that model!
- lifty 5y ago
  Onivim doesn’t use vscode. It’s a from scratch implementation that doesn’t use electron, but they do replicate the vscode plugin system so they can be compatible with it.
- WiiManic 5y ago
  > Just saw that it is actually open source and will be available for non-commercial use for free. I'm more than fine with that model! Yeah, we are using the dual-licensing model that some other projects use. Source available may be a more accurate description, since it can be somewhat controversial to claim to be open source and use our licensing model. Tl;dr: - Commits from the core team are licensed under an EULA for 18 months. You can use Oni2 for free for non-commercial stuff, but need a license for commercial use. - After 18 months, commits are re-licensed to MIT license, and appear in the Oni2-MIT repo, where they are then subject to the normal rules of that license. We do also periodically give to the upstream projects that power us, i.e. you'll see our name in the Vim leaderboard thingy since we give money to the charity that Vim asks for donations to. And to be clear, whilst we use the vim source code as the editing experience base, the UI is our own, thought obviously looks very similar to VSCode, though no UI code is shared etc (Oni2 is written in Reason, VSCode in Typescript).
rapind 5y ago
I'm interested. I don't think it's far enough along for me yet (.vimrc support), but I'll be keeping an eye on it. I really like the "Outline" view, as I'm often editing large files and would find this extremely useful.
TheFreim 5y ago
What does this offer that evil-mode emacs, or even vscode, has to offer...?
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  If every text editor has to implement full emacs functionality, every alternate text editor project should just stop now.
  - TheFreim 5y ago
    Having something to offer != implementing every single feature of emacs. Sometimes NOT having all the stuff emacs has can be a good decision.
- anongraddebt 5y ago
  evil-mode emacs isn't as snappy, vscode is harder to wrangle for a really pure-like vim setup. Someone else in this thread mentioned nvim, and while I like nvim a lot, i like the vscode extension ecosystem also prefer a gui vim editor (ive tried many). long story short, i really like the product roadmap for onivim2, even though it isn't quite feature-full/polished enough to make as my daily driver. i've been a monthly Patreon supporter since last fall, though, and am guessing it'll be my main editor sometime this year!
  - endofunky 5y ago
    This perhaps used to be true if evil-mode was around in the 90s. I've used to use vim and eventually made the switch to emacs about 10 years ago, initially using viper and then becoming an early adopter of evil-mode - and it never felt less snappy than native vim, except for rare occasions when executing complex macros to do things that can't be achieved using regular expression. And the new native compilation makes any perceivable performance difference even more unlikely.
    - TheFreim 5y ago
      I asked what it has to offer which is different than asking "does it do exactly what emacs can do". I am never going to find a more powerful editor than emacs, at least not for a while, but that doesn't mean other editors don't have anything to offer. I still prefer intellij idea when doing Java. VS Code is a lot quicker at certain things than emacs and certain IDE features don't stop working after running it for a while (happens with my emacs setup), among other things. I also use vim for editing things when I'm already in the terminal because of its advantages in that realm.
whatyearisit 5y ago
I really wanted to like Onivim 2, but went back to Visual Studio code after supporting the creator on Patreon for a while. The last build and creator update was provided months ago for supporters. I also wanted to vote against the pricing model, because I think it should be a one time purchase. The creator and his company behind the editor tries to create a serious FOMO on likely customers. I considered it to be a red flag on a potential abandonment. Additionally, I felt it would be easier for Visual Studio code become faster than Onivim 2 can have support for all Visual Studio code extensions. On the plus side, Onivim 2 has some smart defaults which made it a joy to use. I encourage anyone who thinks about buying Onivim 2 to first learn how to fine tune VS Code to look and feel like Onivim 2 because you can.
- zbaylin 5y ago
  Hey, Onivim contributor here. I assume by FOMO you mean the increased license price as time goes on, but as far as I understand (that decision was made before me), the idea is that the product becomes more valuable over time as a result of more features being added. You can still buy a one time license as of right now. As far as abandonment is concerned, I can let you know that hasn’t been discussed. Bryan recently went on his first vacation since working on Oni, but work has resumed since he returned. Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions — the Discord is always open!
  - Camas 5y ago
    >the idea is that the product becomes more valuable over time as a result of more features being added I have a hard time believing that's the main motivation
    - lbotos 5y ago
      Why? I backed it early and paid less for a half-implemented editor but wanted to show support. The later you back the more that's actually built. What main motivation do you think the seller has? It's basically an early bird discount.
twobitshifter 5y ago
Aside, I see it has tabs as defaults- what are people’s thoughts on tabbed editors?
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  My thought on them is that people have no thoughts on it. Use automated formatting tools to completely remove the argument or discussion about tabs/spaces.
  - christophilus 5y ago
    I think he meant tabs as in browser tabs.
- vimacs2 5y ago
  Tabs are fine as long as they represent workspaces instead of a one-to-one mapping to files or buffers. I think the browser tab metaphor does not work very well in a text editor without some modification since you often want to do split layouts and I really don't like the messiness of multiple tab bars. I think Emacs still has the most advanced system for window management and the only thing it should do is maybe modernise the UI surrounding it a bit.
rcarmo 5y ago
This on iOS would be a killer application.
smoldesu 5y ago
I might have cared 2 years ago, but I'm not about to drop forty hard-earned American dollars to try a text editor that I might end up hating. Hell, I probably wouldn't even buy Sublime if it was $40.
deleted 5y ago
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xwdv 5y ago
Put this color scheme in vim or neovim and get a couple plugins and you basically have 90% of this, but better
benatkin 5y ago
I won't touch anything that is almost open source with a ten-foot pole. The two main sticking points for me are A) contributors working for free but not retaining equal rights to the product and B) the tendency of leaders of projects that are not-quite-open source to undermine the Open Source Definition and the Open Source Initiative.
- kadoban 5y ago
  IMO the model they have is the best kind of not-quite-Open-Source, at least. It looks to be every commit to master is MIT licensed after 18 months. Better than "only this bit is Open Source, the rest isn't and never will be". I couldn't work out if the time delay was encoded in the license and the commits are already public even before they're MIT licensed or if it just depends on manual action.
- zbaylin 5y ago
  Hey, Onivim contributor here! I think Oni is in a hard place where it’s the primary source of income for Outrun Labs. Oni is open source in two senses - the source is available online (technically doesn’t meet some definitions of open source, but the source is open) - we MIT commits after 18 months. In terms of contributors retaining rights to the product, we do have a bug bounty program where if you fix a bug with a PR, you get a license for free. Not quite what you mean I’m sure, but it’s essentially payment for contributions. We definitely aren’t deliberately trying to undermine the OSD. The reality of open source software at the moment is that most of it is either created or sponsored by large companies who have a ton of money to throw at it. We are trying a new model of making money from open source software to allow us (well, Bryan) to work on Oni full time. We’re definitely open to suggestions, though!
  - vimacs2 5y ago
    Just so I understand this correctly, the version of Onivim 2 from 18 months ago will be open source? That's not the worst solution if true. John Carmack would do something similar with many of his game engines back when he was working with Id Tech (albeit with a much longer lag time).
linsomniac 5y ago
I've been trying some vim "alternatives" recently. Onivim has been on my radar for years, but I only recently started trying it out. No real opinion on it yet other than: I like the idea of VSCode plugins (the Ansible plugin is apparently quite good, and I've been wanting to try it). Other alternatives I'm playing with: Kakoune, SpaceVim, and LunarVim. The last two are vim configs with plugins. LunarVim and Kakoune (kak) have TreeSitter, for really, really good syntax highlighting. Kak needs a plugin for it. Kak has a fairly interesting multi-cursor setup that reminds me in some ways of "sam" (the little I've played with it). For doing some sorts of macro-like functions to modify many lines, it's pretty slick.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  If you like Kak and are vaguely familiar with Sam I suggest trying out vis: > Vis aims to be a modern, legacy-free, simple yet efficient editor, combining the strengths of both vi(m) and sam. https://github.com/martanne/vis https://github.com/martanne/vis "Differences from Kakoune": https://github.com/martanne/vis/wiki/Differences-from-Kakoune https://github.com/martanne/vis/wiki/Differences-from-Kakoun...
  - linsomniac 5y ago
    Thanks, that was the other one I was actually trying to remember but could only come up with sam. Went through the Wikipedia text editors page a few times and just couldn't remember it.
- arp242 5y ago
  > LunarVim and Kakoune (kak) have TreeSitter, for really, really good syntax highlighting. While Vim's regexp-based syntax highlights certainly has limitations even in fairly simple cases, and I would love to see something better, the downside of these things is that people get carried away and add colours to everything. A little bit of colour is very helpful. Ten different colours seemingly chosen at random is not. I tried that LunarVim thing, which was a somewhat frustrating experience as it doesn't work on light terminals at all (setting background=light and :colorscheme default seems completely broken), somewhat ironic that a project which bills "better colours" as one of its main points doesn't actually work with a common background colour, but okay. The colours for Go are ... not great. Is there any point in highlighting string literals in a different colour than numbers, and bools yet another colour? What extra information does that convey? Or what's the point of highlighting operators in blue? Giving _ its own special colour? That doesn't make it easier to read – quite the opposite as there's an overload of information. There are 10 unique colours with the default Go colorscheme (vs. 4). This alone is noisy and distracting, but they're not even especially well chosen as there's significant overlap with completely unrelated things highlighted in a different colour (escape sequences the same as functions, or nil the same as func; no idea what the point of that is as it's not even a keyword). In short, these tools are nice, but I fear it will lead to an explosion of extremely badly designed colour schemes where people add stuff "because they can" and "ohhh, colours!" without actually thinking if it's a good idea or not. I saw this with vim-go where people constantly sent in patches for dubious colour scheme changes, and you spend forever argueing why it's not a good idea, and at least "it's very slow and will complicate things a lot" was a meaningful barrier. Darn I sound like a grumpy old man... But really, these are design issues I don't see enough consideration of. No colours is bad; some colours is super helpful, but loads of random colours is even worse than no colours. There's some research on it too; NASA did research for colour usage in flight control systems for example and came to the same conclusion (which I can't seem to find right now). Another fun example is the "count the triangles" vs "count the red shapes" in [1]; counting the red shapes is easier, but counting the triangles is easier in the monochrome version vs. the coloured one. [1]: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/Talks/2019/11-21-dijkstra/ https://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/Talks/2019/11-21-dijkstra/
rank0 5y ago
Does it have mouse support out of the box?
tuananh 5y ago
i want onivim to success. i tried it several times but it's not quite there yet, still getting in the way several times during the day.
thayne 5y ago
So, an open source editor based on neovim is being replaced with a proprietary editor with it's own fork of vim as a backend? That's a little disappointing to me.
kgarten 5y ago
As others stated the new neovim is crazy cool (Lua scripting etc.). Was also playing with amp (nice defaults) and helix (my favourite of the week) https://helix-editor.com/ https://helix-editor.com/ Looking for a modern editor written in go or rust :)
nsonha 5y ago
can someone explain to me what the minimap is? other than a very big scrollbar? Every damn editor since sublime has this useless "feature", annoying.
- vimacs2 5y ago
  I don't think it should ever be on by default but I do find it useful situationally, when scrolling through very large files (which ideally you want to avoid in your codebase in the first place) and when I don't necessarily have a specific search term or keyword in mind.
  - nsonha 5y ago
    > I don't think it should ever be on by default Yet every single one of them has it on by default (not even autohide by default). As if they're afraid the user finds out how useless it is.
    - vimacs2 5y ago
      You're overthinking this. It's on by default because many users now expect it and it's surprising (at least to me as an Emacs user) how little people tend to dive into configuring their editors. I guess it also looks kind of neat.
pacomerh 5y ago
How does this compare to vscode-neovim?, which is a FULL neovim embedded instance. Wouldn't this be enough? https://github.com/asvetliakov/vscode-neovim https://github.com/asvetliakov/vscode-neovim
chimen 5y ago
I've been trying to figure out what are they using (in terms of npm packages / projects) to re-create that vscode ui. Any ideas?
- tuananh 5y ago
  the source code is available here https://github.com/onivim/oni2 https://github.com/onivim/oni2
  - chimen 5y ago
    Saw it but didn't find anything. I guess it's a complete re-implementation of the UI. The comments seem to suggest that as well.
    - zbaylin 5y ago
      Yeah the UI is completely custom built using Revery (a custom-built Electron alternative). Similarities to VSCode are just a result of it being the main inspiration. I would say Sublime also has a large influence on our design, i.e. in the minimap
vimacs2 5y ago
I managed to build it and test it a little bit and damn, it's not just marketing to describe it as having an insanely fast start up time. It launched almost as quick as I can spawn new client windows from my Emacs daemon and scrolling and text editing seems to be buttery smooth as well. However, I really don't like the fact that there is no way to navigate tabs using vim's commands. I also find the VSCode similarities distracting and it seems to be causing confusion to would be investors of this due to the assumption it's some branch of it as opposed to a completely new editor. Finally, is there a way to remove the system bar on the top in the configuration? I can toggle most elements of the UI but that system bar is visible even in zen mode and I never use it in any text editor with support for keyboard driven commands.
- bryanphe 5y ago
  Thanks for trying it out and sharing your feedback, appreciate it! > However, I really don't like the fact that there is no way to navigate tabs using vim's commands. There's a related feature request here: https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/3673 https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/3673 > I also find the VSCode similarities distracting and it seems to be causing confusion to would be investors of this due to the assumption it's some branch of it as opposed to a completely new editor. I agree, this is consistent feedback we get... There's a ton of potential to have a built-for-modal-editing UX that we're missing at the moment. > Finally, is there a way to remove the system bar on the top in the configuration? I can toggle most elements of the UI but that system bar is visible even in zen mode and I never use it in any text editor with support for keyboard driven commands. Yes, there is a `window.menuBarVisibility` configuration setting: https://onivim.github.io/docs/configuration/settings#layout https://onivim.github.io/docs/configuration/settings#layout

190 points by niedzielski 5y ago

a3w 5y ago

Buying software without a trial makes me disinterested. I still want to learn using vim every day, but won't commit to this text editor/vsx-powered IDE, unless I find out that I have the guts to use it every day. Also, there is VIM mode for VS Code, I guess.

injidup 5y ago
Hand holding is still a thing here I guess. https://onivim.github.io/docs/for-developers/building https://onivim.github.io/docs/for-developers/building
- toastal 5y ago
  It's pretty nice to see such beginner-friendly documentation tbh.
gryn 5y ago
it seems to be open source there's a link in the page to the project's GitHub page. https://github.com/onivim/oni2 https://github.com/onivim/oni2
- mdaniel 5y ago
  Pedantically, I believe it's closer to "source available" than open source, since their license specifically adds a lot of restrictions on the end user
ddek 5y ago
> Also, there is VIM mode for VS Code, I guess. I feel like this is something said by people who are more invested in VS Code than vim. The main vim plugin for VS Code is straight trash.* It's slow, buggy, and unintuitive; while lacking the extensibility that vim has. At least IDEAVim, which has the same limitations of being built in another IDE, replicates enough of the common plugins to be pleasant. It's also worth noting that onivim is not VS Code repackaged. It is not an electron app, and it doesn't appear to use the monaco editor. They have apparently taken great design inspiration from VS Code, which I think is a fairly diffident decision. Overall, I'm looking at neovim nightly and not knowing why onivim is a thing. I can understand the appeal of a GUI vim, but implementing a vim backend is a monumental task if you intend to be compatible with existing vim plugins (and you should). Nvim 0.5 has native lua, and now freed from vimscript the quality of plugins is improving continuously. I just can't see a way for a 'third vim' - if you don't start with vimscript you won't be compatible, but if you do you're already outdated. * There are a few attempts to splice VS Code and neovim, all of these are awful.
- WiiManic 5y ago
  > but implementing a vim backend is a monumental task if you intend to be compatible with existing vim plugins We skipped that and haven't implemented any vim backend at all! We use/made libvim[1], which is just the vim source, that we've essentially turned into a library. So its the vim code base with terminal UI stuff stripped out, and an interface added for us to hook into it. The README of that repo has some good insight into that (including why we didn't use neovim here, as much as the team all loves nvim). We don't support vimscript stuff at the moment, but its in progress as all the vim source code is there to load/run it as normal, its just about integrating is properly into Oni2 (making sure keybinds are working, commands are properly loaded, packing stuff up nicely for distrib etc). (There is some other motivation bits in this doc[2]. Its outdated since we haven't edited it since before the project started, but it outlines the motivations we went in with etc). [1]: https://github.com/onivim/libvim https://github.com/onivim/libvim [2]: https://github.com/onivim/oni2/blob/master/docs/MOTIVATION.md https://github.com/onivim/oni2/blob/master/docs/MOTIVATION.m...
  - jnovek 5y ago
    “We skipped that and haven't implemented any vim backend at all ... so its the vim code base with terminal UI stuff stripped out, and an interface added for us to hook into it.” You took out the most important part! I don’t know about other people, but I became a vim user because I found myself configuring servers and needed to know a better text editor than nano. Vim is also my primary code editor these days but portability is still a killer feature.
    - lbotos 5y ago
      You are mis-interpreting what they did. They literally took vim, and built a ui around it. No re-implementation. It's Vim with a more modern frontend stack. You can go look at the libvim source and see it for yourself. The point of this is to bring Vim into more modern workflows, not but "vim compat" but literally... vim. Source: had some pull requests into libvim a while back to remove a lot of the various legacy compat features that don't make sense for libvim.
  - 5y ago
WiiManic 5y ago
Oni2 is available for use for free for non-commercial usage, it just needs building from source at the moment. The steps are in the user manual if anyone is interested: https://onivim.github.io/docs/for-developers/building https://onivim.github.io/docs/for-developers/building Partially that is a thank you to those who have supported our development, and partially its to help put up a small barrier to entry, just so we don't get too flooded with issues and feature requests! A public release is coming soon-ish, and can be used for non-commercial use.
- lasagnaphil 5y ago
  I found that it was incredibly painstaking to build though, it's quite a barrier. I wanted to try it out a bit before buying, but it seemed to consume a considerable amount of disk space (>20GB), along with downloading tons of NPM dependencies and giving out weird errors during building. Is there a particular reason why do you need such an amount of dependencies for building an editor?
rapind 5y ago
According to their FAQ it looks like they'll be offering a trial version once they hit v1. https://onivim.github.io/docs/other/faq#is-there-a-trial-version https://onivim.github.io/docs/other/faq#is-there-a-trial-ver...
steveklabnik 5y ago
I use the vim mode for VS: Code as my daily driver, and unlike the one sibling comment, don't think it sucks. I still purchased an Onivim 2 license. It's not far along enough for me to use daily yet, or at least, it wasn't last time I tried it out and I haven't had the time to look again, but I am excited for when it is. That said, when I did this it was a one-time cost, and it looks like now it's a Patreon thing. Still though, $10 is pretty cheap, and if you hate it, you can always cancel. Or at least, that's how I think about these things these days. Not everyone has $10 to spare on stuff like this, but I am fortunate to.

pope_meat 5y ago

I stared at the landing page for a good 15 seconds wondering "why is that picture... breathing?"

pantulis 5y ago
Same here!
cobertos 5y ago
It made it so much hard to just take in and understand the UI. Glad I'm not the only one that felt that way.
- spondyl 5y ago
  The animation up and down causes blurriness on my monitor, presumably from aliasing or something
- jamesrcole 5y ago
  Someone had to make the conscious choice to make it do that, then add the code for it — I’d love to know what their rationale was. I find it difficult to imagine how they thought it’d make things better, and how they could have missed the downsides of it. I think it’s something they really should fix, because it screams “poor judgment”, which gives a bad first impression of their work.
bryanphe 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback! I removed the animation... hopefully not as jarring now.

enw 5y ago

Isn’t this VS Code with the Vim extension?

felixr 5y ago
No, it is actually using the real vim in the background. So while you might not be able to use all vim plugins/scripts, it should give you a much more complete vim experience. See also https://github.com/onivim/libvim https://github.com/onivim/libvim
- e12e 5y ago
  Is it better than (the AFAIK newer) https://github.com/asvetliakov/vscode-neovim https://github.com/asvetliakov/vscode-neovim ?
ddek 5y ago
No, likely out of diffidence onivim has a very similar design to VSC. It doesn't appear to share any code with VS Code though.
- WiiManic 5y ago
  This isn't technically true, the extension host we use is directly the one from VSCode, such that we can support their extensions (well...a subset as we fill in the gaps in for the Oni2 <-> ExtHost communication). But the actual core editor is all seperate, written in ReasonML (or OCaml if you know that instead), with a bunch of C libs in the background we've wrapped (Skia/Harfbuzz/We wrap real vim etc). So the core editing experience has no code sharing, but the extension side of things does!
trutannus 5y ago
Took far too long for me to figure out that this isn't just a VS Code extension. I'm not even entirely sure this isn't.
hvis 5y ago
Seems like it's Vim with a VS Code extension/adapter instead. Intriguing idea, though not sure how viable.

skavi 5y ago

How fast does this feel compared to VS Code? I went into the whole onivim -> revery -> reason rabbit hole and the native code compilation is compelling, but Flutter does the same thing and is pretty slow.

xaduha 5y ago
It feels faster than VSCode, but I would wait until at least 0.6 before trying it out more.
mesaframe 5y ago
I tried it and it's buttery smooth. Feels like notepad.
cassepipe 5y ago
Startup time is almost instantaneous. It's very responsive and works well on an old machine with only 4Go Ram. Not ready to abandon the terminal yet but if I ever do, this will be my choice.

da_big_ghey 5y ago

«retro-futuristic modal editor» not helpful for marketing, what is the meaning here? maybe some correlation with «outrun labs» name and outrun look, but not clear. it also has advertisement for «native code» but this not always means fast. text editor problem is more latency than «speed», any latency benchmark made yet?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

phelipetls 5y ago

It's unfortunate that some VS Code extensions, e.g. remote development extensions, can't be used in Onivim 2 due to license restrictions[1]. [1]: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/196#issuecomment-523012854 https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/196#issuecomment...

JonathonW 5y ago
Can any VS Code extensions be used in Onivim 2? Despite appearances, Onivim isn't a VS Code fork, it doesn't use Electron, and it's not written in Javascript-- it just happens to take substantial inspiration from VS Code's UI.
- zargon 5y ago
  > Can any VS Code extensions be used in Onivim 2? Yes, this is basically the entire point of Onivim (use vscode extensions with vim). https://open-vsx.org/ https://open-vsx.org/
- WiiManic 5y ago
  We host the VSCode extension host, which is how Oni2 can use VSCode extensions. I.e, the whole front end and core editor is native code (ReasonML/C), and then there is a nicely typed interface where we communicate with a node instance to run VSCode extensions. We broadly end up with Oni2 <-> Ext Host <-> Extension. We have to implement the Oni2 side for each thing, so parse the message sent, and how to action on that and render it, but it lets us run VSCode extensions, still in a native editor. There are some caveats, like the license issue mentioned, the largest being that extensions that heavily depend on rendering custom components / web pages aren't possible, just since Revery has no browser etc to render anything like that with. We've focused on language ones to start though, and that has meant we support a decent selection of langauges as adding one feature unblocks loads of extensions.

nine_k 5y ago

What's most interesting for me here is Revery, the GUI framework. React-like, cross-platform, native-code, MIT-licensed. Yes, it's not using native widgets (so no built-in accessibility), but that might be fine in many cases.

romwell 5y ago
Looking forward to seeing it displace Electron.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Not soon: however I like ML-style languages, it's JS / TS what has the mass market adoption now. It's not even the language, it's not much harder to learn than TS. It's the smaller library ecosystem of Reason / OCaml.
  - toastal 5y ago
    But they get a simpler, sounder type system in OCaml as a result which should make maintenance easier for them. Given that they want this style of programming the ergonomics should be a lot easier than TypeScript as well.
- k__ 5y ago
  Back in the days, I would have bet on Revery as Electron replacement. But currently, Tauri seems like a more viable option.
zbaylin 5y ago
I’ve actually been working on adding more support for native widgets in Revery, mostly focusing on macOS since thats my daily OS, but Windows too. You can now use native buttons and menus, and I’m looking into adding other native inputs (like text fields).
- nine_k 5y ago
  This is great news. Native text inputs have a lot of important affordances like navigation keys, selection, and spelling.

dasdadjak 5y ago

Was an early adopter in 2019, right now not so much. No proper channel distributions, no hidpi support, UI clone/copy/paste of vscode - all things which actually makes user sad... After all going in the wrong direction, sorry.

ford_o 5y ago

Why does it try to look like vscode clone? I understand that the vscode ecosystem is awesome. However, I always felt like the UI was severaly lacking behind proper IDE like intellij. Give me intellij-like documentation popup, run, build & debug buttons and debug UI, and I will switch in an instant!

jevgeni 5y ago
This is what irked me about it. We already have VS Code. For me the defaults there are tolerable, but not the pinnacle of ergonomics.
zbaylin 5y ago
Hey, Onivim contributor here. Unfortunately none of the main contributors are designers. I think we end up with a very VSCode-similar look because in terms of UX that’s our main inspiration. We do diverge in some areas, though. Debug functionality is on our radar and it will hopefully be in relatively soon!
- inside_out_life 5y ago
  look at something like Obsidian for modern editor UX

siproprio 5y ago

Does it really have INSTANT startup time (i.e. Sublime Text)? If it has, I'm interested. Was not able to find the trial though.

xaduha 5y ago
$ time /opt/oni/Onivim2.AppDir/usr/bin/Oni2 --nofork --silent -c qa real 0m0,360s user 0m0,280s sys 0m0,042s
pharke 5y ago
Yes, the startup time is amazing. You can build from source if you want to try it out without paying. I bought a license and I've been using it on and off for personal projects but it is still in development so don't expect everything to be perfect. Still really good though, actually feels like (is) Vim with a modern UI.
- lasagnaphil 5y ago
  Though it's incredibly painstaking to do a source build; at least in my Arch setup it needed about 20GB of disk space and a lot of time and patience (it needs the Ocaml compiler and also downloads a ton of NPM dependencies!!!), and the PKGBUILD script failed due to a reason I've yet to figure out. I was thinking about trying out Onivim someday but this one thing was the whole dealbreaker. I thought that if your program is advertised to be light and fast it would also be easy to build, but welp that's unfortunately not the case.
  - vimacs2 5y ago
    > I was thinking about trying out Onivim someday but this one thing was the whole dealbreaker. I thought that if your program is advertised to be light and fast it would also be easy to build, but welp that's unfortunately not the case. This is not really a reasonable expectation to have for non-free software. The software is made for those willing to pay the licensing fee to download a prebuilt binary, not those that will end up wanting to compile it themselves. Fast performance != fast build times. I personally appreciate the fact that the source is even provided - though obviously with a non free license.

albingroen 5y ago

I bought a license like 6 months ago and have tried a couple of times back and forth during this period. I thought this was exactly what I was looking for. A modern mix on Vim and VSCode. I was pretty disappointed though tbh. You can really just VSCode with the Vim extension, or just use actual Vim. I think there is space for a product like this though, so A for effort!

JNRowe 5y ago
Much like you, I think I'm probably the target audience for this. One of the things that stops me from using neovim - regardless of any changes I'd like - is the removal of gvim. I like my gvim candy; SVG icons in sign columns, better modifier support in maps, drag and drop when in command line, $things_ive_forgot_i_use. Likewise, I also believe the idea of onivim is worth a licence fee, even it turns out I can't get behind it. It just feels like one of those projects I want to see succeed, even if it isn't for me.
- atweiden 5y ago
  Onivim has a high chance of becoming the best heavyweight GUI Vim IDE distribution over the coming years. I bought a once-off lifetime commercial license a good while ago and now get nightly updates. I wish the team all the success in the world.
- xvilka 5y ago
  There are external NeoVim GUIs though, for example Neovide[1]. [1] https://github.com/Kethku/neovide https://github.com/Kethku/neovide
  - JNRowe 5y ago
    Yeah, I've tried a few. I can't quite put my finger on what is wrong, but the ones I've tried just don't feel right. gnvim¹ was the most usable for me. However, it isn't without problems for my use case. To use my earlier example, switching would mean patching fonts or using overrides in fonts.conf to fake the use of icons in signs. I did take another look just now², and there a few more for me to try out ;) ¹ https://github.com/vhakulinen/gnvim https://github.com/vhakulinen/gnvim ² https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects

koehr 5y ago

Honestly, melting two open source editors together (or rather cloning one while integrating the other) and ask for that amount of money for it is in my opinion unacceptable. The only thing that would make this a bit more acceptable is when the developers are promising to spend a lot of their earnings for vim development (and maybe VSCode, too). *edit:* Just saw that it is actually open source and will be available for non-commercial use for free. I'm more than fine with that model!

lifty 5y ago
Onivim doesn’t use vscode. It’s a from scratch implementation that doesn’t use electron, but they do replicate the vscode plugin system so they can be compatible with it.
WiiManic 5y ago
> Just saw that it is actually open source and will be available for non-commercial use for free. I'm more than fine with that model! Yeah, we are using the dual-licensing model that some other projects use. Source available may be a more accurate description, since it can be somewhat controversial to claim to be open source and use our licensing model. Tl;dr: - Commits from the core team are licensed under an EULA for 18 months. You can use Oni2 for free for non-commercial stuff, but need a license for commercial use. - After 18 months, commits are re-licensed to MIT license, and appear in the Oni2-MIT repo, where they are then subject to the normal rules of that license. We do also periodically give to the upstream projects that power us, i.e. you'll see our name in the Vim leaderboard thingy since we give money to the charity that Vim asks for donations to. And to be clear, whilst we use the vim source code as the editing experience base, the UI is our own, thought obviously looks very similar to VSCode, though no UI code is shared etc (Oni2 is written in Reason, VSCode in Typescript).

rapind 5y ago

I'm interested. I don't think it's far enough along for me yet (.vimrc support), but I'll be keeping an eye on it. I really like the "Outline" view, as I'm often editing large files and would find this extremely useful.

TheFreim 5y ago

What does this offer that evil-mode emacs, or even vscode, has to offer...?

twobitshifter 5y ago
If every text editor has to implement full emacs functionality, every alternate text editor project should just stop now.
- TheFreim 5y ago
  Having something to offer != implementing every single feature of emacs. Sometimes NOT having all the stuff emacs has can be a good decision.
anongraddebt 5y ago
evil-mode emacs isn't as snappy, vscode is harder to wrangle for a really pure-like vim setup. Someone else in this thread mentioned nvim, and while I like nvim a lot, i like the vscode extension ecosystem also prefer a gui vim editor (ive tried many). long story short, i really like the product roadmap for onivim2, even though it isn't quite feature-full/polished enough to make as my daily driver. i've been a monthly Patreon supporter since last fall, though, and am guessing it'll be my main editor sometime this year!
- endofunky 5y ago
  This perhaps used to be true if evil-mode was around in the 90s. I've used to use vim and eventually made the switch to emacs about 10 years ago, initially using viper and then becoming an early adopter of evil-mode - and it never felt less snappy than native vim, except for rare occasions when executing complex macros to do things that can't be achieved using regular expression. And the new native compilation makes any perceivable performance difference even more unlikely.
  - TheFreim 5y ago
    I asked what it has to offer which is different than asking "does it do exactly what emacs can do". I am never going to find a more powerful editor than emacs, at least not for a while, but that doesn't mean other editors don't have anything to offer. I still prefer intellij idea when doing Java. VS Code is a lot quicker at certain things than emacs and certain IDE features don't stop working after running it for a while (happens with my emacs setup), among other things. I also use vim for editing things when I'm already in the terminal because of its advantages in that realm.

whatyearisit 5y ago

I really wanted to like Onivim 2, but went back to Visual Studio code after supporting the creator on Patreon for a while. The last build and creator update was provided months ago for supporters. I also wanted to vote against the pricing model, because I think it should be a one time purchase. The creator and his company behind the editor tries to create a serious FOMO on likely customers. I considered it to be a red flag on a potential abandonment. Additionally, I felt it would be easier for Visual Studio code become faster than Onivim 2 can have support for all Visual Studio code extensions. On the plus side, Onivim 2 has some smart defaults which made it a joy to use. I encourage anyone who thinks about buying Onivim 2 to first learn how to fine tune VS Code to look and feel like Onivim 2 because you can.

zbaylin 5y ago
Hey, Onivim contributor here. I assume by FOMO you mean the increased license price as time goes on, but as far as I understand (that decision was made before me), the idea is that the product becomes more valuable over time as a result of more features being added. You can still buy a one time license as of right now. As far as abandonment is concerned, I can let you know that hasn’t been discussed. Bryan recently went on his first vacation since working on Oni, but work has resumed since he returned. Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions — the Discord is always open!
- Camas 5y ago
  >the idea is that the product becomes more valuable over time as a result of more features being added I have a hard time believing that's the main motivation
  - lbotos 5y ago
    Why? I backed it early and paid less for a half-implemented editor but wanted to show support. The later you back the more that's actually built. What main motivation do you think the seller has? It's basically an early bird discount.

twobitshifter 5y ago

Aside, I see it has tabs as defaults- what are people’s thoughts on tabbed editors?

qbasic_forever 5y ago
My thought on them is that people have no thoughts on it. Use automated formatting tools to completely remove the argument or discussion about tabs/spaces.
- christophilus 5y ago
  I think he meant tabs as in browser tabs.
vimacs2 5y ago
Tabs are fine as long as they represent workspaces instead of a one-to-one mapping to files or buffers. I think the browser tab metaphor does not work very well in a text editor without some modification since you often want to do split layouts and I really don't like the messiness of multiple tab bars. I think Emacs still has the most advanced system for window management and the only thing it should do is maybe modernise the UI surrounding it a bit.

rcarmo 5y ago

This on iOS would be a killer application.

smoldesu 5y ago

I might have cared 2 years ago, but I'm not about to drop forty hard-earned American dollars to try a text editor that I might end up hating. Hell, I probably wouldn't even buy Sublime if it was $40.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

xwdv 5y ago

Put this color scheme in vim or neovim and get a couple plugins and you basically have 90% of this, but better

benatkin 5y ago

I won't touch anything that is almost open source with a ten-foot pole. The two main sticking points for me are A) contributors working for free but not retaining equal rights to the product and B) the tendency of leaders of projects that are not-quite-open source to undermine the Open Source Definition and the Open Source Initiative.

kadoban 5y ago
IMO the model they have is the best kind of not-quite-Open-Source, at least. It looks to be every commit to master is MIT licensed after 18 months. Better than "only this bit is Open Source, the rest isn't and never will be". I couldn't work out if the time delay was encoded in the license and the commits are already public even before they're MIT licensed or if it just depends on manual action.
zbaylin 5y ago
Hey, Onivim contributor here! I think Oni is in a hard place where it’s the primary source of income for Outrun Labs. Oni is open source in two senses - the source is available online (technically doesn’t meet some definitions of open source, but the source is open) - we MIT commits after 18 months. In terms of contributors retaining rights to the product, we do have a bug bounty program where if you fix a bug with a PR, you get a license for free. Not quite what you mean I’m sure, but it’s essentially payment for contributions. We definitely aren’t deliberately trying to undermine the OSD. The reality of open source software at the moment is that most of it is either created or sponsored by large companies who have a ton of money to throw at it. We are trying a new model of making money from open source software to allow us (well, Bryan) to work on Oni full time. We’re definitely open to suggestions, though!
- vimacs2 5y ago
  Just so I understand this correctly, the version of Onivim 2 from 18 months ago will be open source? That's not the worst solution if true. John Carmack would do something similar with many of his game engines back when he was working with Id Tech (albeit with a much longer lag time).

linsomniac 5y ago

I've been trying some vim "alternatives" recently. Onivim has been on my radar for years, but I only recently started trying it out. No real opinion on it yet other than: I like the idea of VSCode plugins (the Ansible plugin is apparently quite good, and I've been wanting to try it). Other alternatives I'm playing with: Kakoune, SpaceVim, and LunarVim. The last two are vim configs with plugins. LunarVim and Kakoune (kak) have TreeSitter, for really, really good syntax highlighting. Kak needs a plugin for it. Kak has a fairly interesting multi-cursor setup that reminds me in some ways of "sam" (the little I've played with it). For doing some sorts of macro-like functions to modify many lines, it's pretty slick.

0xdeadb00f 5y ago
If you like Kak and are vaguely familiar with Sam I suggest trying out vis: > Vis aims to be a modern, legacy-free, simple yet efficient editor, combining the strengths of both vi(m) and sam. https://github.com/martanne/vis https://github.com/martanne/vis "Differences from Kakoune": https://github.com/martanne/vis/wiki/Differences-from-Kakoune https://github.com/martanne/vis/wiki/Differences-from-Kakoun...
- linsomniac 5y ago
  Thanks, that was the other one I was actually trying to remember but could only come up with sam. Went through the Wikipedia text editors page a few times and just couldn't remember it.
arp242 5y ago
> LunarVim and Kakoune (kak) have TreeSitter, for really, really good syntax highlighting. While Vim's regexp-based syntax highlights certainly has limitations even in fairly simple cases, and I would love to see something better, the downside of these things is that people get carried away and add colours to everything. A little bit of colour is very helpful. Ten different colours seemingly chosen at random is not. I tried that LunarVim thing, which was a somewhat frustrating experience as it doesn't work on light terminals at all (setting background=light and :colorscheme default seems completely broken), somewhat ironic that a project which bills "better colours" as one of its main points doesn't actually work with a common background colour, but okay. The colours for Go are ... not great. Is there any point in highlighting string literals in a different colour than numbers, and bools yet another colour? What extra information does that convey? Or what's the point of highlighting operators in blue? Giving _ its own special colour? That doesn't make it easier to read – quite the opposite as there's an overload of information. There are 10 unique colours with the default Go colorscheme (vs. 4). This alone is noisy and distracting, but they're not even especially well chosen as there's significant overlap with completely unrelated things highlighted in a different colour (escape sequences the same as functions, or nil the same as func; no idea what the point of that is as it's not even a keyword). In short, these tools are nice, but I fear it will lead to an explosion of extremely badly designed colour schemes where people add stuff "because they can" and "ohhh, colours!" without actually thinking if it's a good idea or not. I saw this with vim-go where people constantly sent in patches for dubious colour scheme changes, and you spend forever argueing why it's not a good idea, and at least "it's very slow and will complicate things a lot" was a meaningful barrier. Darn I sound like a grumpy old man... But really, these are design issues I don't see enough consideration of. No colours is bad; some colours is super helpful, but loads of random colours is even worse than no colours. There's some research on it too; NASA did research for colour usage in flight control systems for example and came to the same conclusion (which I can't seem to find right now). Another fun example is the "count the triangles" vs "count the red shapes" in [1]; counting the red shapes is easier, but counting the triangles is easier in the monochrome version vs. the coloured one. [1]: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/Talks/2019/11-21-dijkstra/ https://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/Talks/2019/11-21-dijkstra/

rank0 5y ago

Does it have mouse support out of the box?

tuananh 5y ago

i want onivim to success. i tried it several times but it's not quite there yet, still getting in the way several times during the day.

thayne 5y ago

So, an open source editor based on neovim is being replaced with a proprietary editor with it's own fork of vim as a backend? That's a little disappointing to me.

kgarten 5y ago

As others stated the new neovim is crazy cool (Lua scripting etc.). Was also playing with amp (nice defaults) and helix (my favourite of the week) https://helix-editor.com/ https://helix-editor.com/ Looking for a modern editor written in go or rust :)

nsonha 5y ago

can someone explain to me what the minimap is? other than a very big scrollbar? Every damn editor since sublime has this useless "feature", annoying.

vimacs2 5y ago
I don't think it should ever be on by default but I do find it useful situationally, when scrolling through very large files (which ideally you want to avoid in your codebase in the first place) and when I don't necessarily have a specific search term or keyword in mind.
- nsonha 5y ago
  > I don't think it should ever be on by default Yet every single one of them has it on by default (not even autohide by default). As if they're afraid the user finds out how useless it is.
  - vimacs2 5y ago
    You're overthinking this. It's on by default because many users now expect it and it's surprising (at least to me as an Emacs user) how little people tend to dive into configuring their editors. I guess it also looks kind of neat.

pacomerh 5y ago

How does this compare to vscode-neovim?, which is a FULL neovim embedded instance. Wouldn't this be enough? https://github.com/asvetliakov/vscode-neovim https://github.com/asvetliakov/vscode-neovim

chimen 5y ago

I've been trying to figure out what are they using (in terms of npm packages / projects) to re-create that vscode ui. Any ideas?

tuananh 5y ago
the source code is available here https://github.com/onivim/oni2 https://github.com/onivim/oni2
- chimen 5y ago
  Saw it but didn't find anything. I guess it's a complete re-implementation of the UI. The comments seem to suggest that as well.
  - zbaylin 5y ago
    Yeah the UI is completely custom built using Revery (a custom-built Electron alternative). Similarities to VSCode are just a result of it being the main inspiration. I would say Sublime also has a large influence on our design, i.e. in the minimap

vimacs2 5y ago

I managed to build it and test it a little bit and damn, it's not just marketing to describe it as having an insanely fast start up time. It launched almost as quick as I can spawn new client windows from my Emacs daemon and scrolling and text editing seems to be buttery smooth as well. However, I really don't like the fact that there is no way to navigate tabs using vim's commands. I also find the VSCode similarities distracting and it seems to be causing confusion to would be investors of this due to the assumption it's some branch of it as opposed to a completely new editor. Finally, is there a way to remove the system bar on the top in the configuration? I can toggle most elements of the UI but that system bar is visible even in zen mode and I never use it in any text editor with support for keyboard driven commands.

bryanphe 5y ago
Thanks for trying it out and sharing your feedback, appreciate it! > However, I really don't like the fact that there is no way to navigate tabs using vim's commands. There's a related feature request here: https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/3673 https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/3673 > I also find the VSCode similarities distracting and it seems to be causing confusion to would be investors of this due to the assumption it's some branch of it as opposed to a completely new editor. I agree, this is consistent feedback we get... There's a ton of potential to have a built-for-modal-editing UX that we're missing at the moment. > Finally, is there a way to remove the system bar on the top in the configuration? I can toggle most elements of the UI but that system bar is visible even in zen mode and I never use it in any text editor with support for keyboard driven commands. Yes, there is a `window.menuBarVisibility` configuration setting: https://onivim.github.io/docs/configuration/settings#layout https://onivim.github.io/docs/configuration/settings#layout