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I've been using MacVim for 15 years; it has been pretty much solid the entire time, and I'm used to its mouse integration. When I started out, I was doing a lo

I've been using MacVim for 15 years; it has been pretty much solid the entire time, and I'm used to its mouse integration. When I started out, I was doing a lot of cross-platform development and there was a Windows version of Vim which behaved almost the same. It was great to have a powerful text editing experience which was pretty much the same everywhere. I tried out NeoVim, but as far as I can tell, it seems to be terminal-only/keyboard-only? I can use Vim keyboard-only (certainly I do that all the time over ssh), but it's not my preference. My second choice for editing behind MacVim isn't NeoVim but VSCode, but I don't use VSCode with Vim bindings because in my experience grafting Vim bindings onto any editor not Vim won't be feature complete. In a perfect world, there would be an IDE which is truly a Vim-style modal editor at its core.

andrewl 5y ago
I just started looking into Neovim, and I had the same concern about it being terminal-only. But then I saw this on the Neovim site: "Graphical interfaces are not packaged with Neovim. GUIs are not limited by terminal capabilities and can choose to override the rendering of certain neovim elements (cursor, tabline, popup menu, etc)...See Neovim's wiki[1] for a list of many of the available GUIs." [1] https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects#gui https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects#gui
- rectang 5y ago
  This looks interesting: https://github.com/asvetliakov/vscode-neovim https://github.com/asvetliakov/vscode-neovim > This extension uses a full embedded Neovim instance, no more half-complete VIM emulation! VSCode's native functionality is used for insert mode and editor commands, making the best use of both editors. I like lots of things about VSCode, but there are inefficiencies with editing that just drive me bananas so I keep falling back to good old familiar MacVim. For instance, line wrapping, auto-indenting, and mouse-select-then-rewrap in comments — comment support in the Vim ecosystem seems to have been designed by and for people who really care about good documentation, while I have to work much harder to get my comments and docs to look good when editing with VSCode. Hopefully the mechanism of embedding a full NeoVim instance will allow for a moe-or-less feature-complete Vim editing experince.
- cassepipe 5y ago
  There is also Onivim although it is not 1.0 yet. Development is financed through selling licenses but it is open source and you can build it yourself. Development has stalled when the main dev got a job some months but there are apparently still people willing to develop it. https://www.onivim.io/ https://www.onivim.io/
  - halostatue 5y ago
    Oni2 is not vim. It does not act like vim. It uses neither Vimscript nor Lua, but instead Javascript (VSCode-based extensions). I paid for an Oni2 licence and regret it, because it isn’t what I want, which is a MacVim.app wrapper for neovim. If you like MacVim.app, there is _absolutely no GUI that is acceptable_ for neovim. I understand why, and I’m not interested in taking on the development myself. But until someone makes a GUI that is as well-integrated with macOS as MacVim.app, I will be using vim and not neovim.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
thayne 5y ago
In addition to the fact that there are guis for neovim, neovim in the terminal does support mouse interaction as well (assuming your terminal emulator supports it, which should be the case for most modern terminals).
- rectang 5y ago
  I just tried out nvim in the MacOS Terminal, and a couple of things didn't work right away. First, clicking on a location didn't set the cursor. Especially when editing large files, I like to scroll in MacVim, click to set the cursor and then start typing. While I can do things like note the line number and jump, or scroll by moving the cursor with key commands, I find those less efficient. Second, selecting text using the mouse didn't produce a selection that Vim knew about. I use this feature all the time in MacVim, to produce a visual selection which I then rewrap using `gq`, filter by piping the selection through an autoformatter like `rustfmt`, etc. Again, I can do this using keyboard navigation exclusively to make visual selections, but I find it easier to select using the mouse.
  - thayne 5y ago
    Interesting, all of those things work for me with alacritty, kitty, gnome terminal, etc. Maybe it is a limitation of MacOS Terminal? Or you need to explicitly enable `set mouse=a`?
    - 1_player 5y ago
      Mouse support isn't enabled by default, on any terminal. You need set mouse=a
      - rectang 5y ago
        Thank you, that solves the issue! This seems to be something in Vim rather than a NeoVim-specific setting, as I tried the same thing with the standard Vim and it worked the same. The scrolling feel in the Terminal isn't as smooth as MacVim, but it's still pretty good.
dummy_physicist 5y ago
You can give VimR[0] a try, I don't know what mouse features you use on MacVim, but that was the most pleasing GUI version of vim/neovim I've used. [0]: https://github.com/qvacua/vimr https://github.com/qvacua/vimr
- rectang 5y ago
  I've just installed it and started playing around. On first open, a lot of the interface was unreadable because VimR seemed to be assuming a dark background, but I use a white background. `set bg=light` didn't fix it. `colorScheme=PaperColor` fixed it incidentally because it didn't find the color scheme and reverted to something legible, haha. Next, I tried to set the font size for the navigator to something bigger because my eyes aren't that great. Although I can use `set guifont` to set the editor area font, the navigation area doesn't change. Presumably there's some way to fix it, I just haven't found it yet. VimR looks cool and I really like having the navigator there IDE-style, but it seems like there will be a period of adjustment. Nothing new for someone accustomed to Vim, haha. The main IDE-style features I've been going without in my ordinary day-to-day editing with MacVim are the autocompletion, suggestion, and hover-to-show-documentation. (I've started using ALE which is helpful but needs some tweaking before it's really usable.) It might be possible to get those with either MacVim or NeoVim, and it would be worth the configuration to set them up if so.
  - petepete 5y ago
    Have you tried coc? Despite the repo name it works with regular vim too and is definitely the easiest way to get completion and other LSP functionality (jumping to definitions, doc previews, error highlighting etc). https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim
sigzero 5y ago
Yeah, there are a bazillion UIs (and most have stopped being updated) but nothing that comes with like vim/gvim. I might have looked at neovim if there was a neovim/gneovim but that isn't the case. I am okay with Lua. I am okay with Vimscript and Vimscript9. So neither of those is a pusher for me.

andrewl 5y ago

I just started looking into Neovim, and I had the same concern about it being terminal-only. But then I saw this on the Neovim site: "Graphical interfaces are not packaged with Neovim. GUIs are not limited by terminal capabilities and can choose to override the rendering of certain neovim elements (cursor, tabline, popup menu, etc)...See Neovim's wiki[1] for a list of many of the available GUIs." [1] https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects#gui https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects#gui

rectang 5y ago
This looks interesting: https://github.com/asvetliakov/vscode-neovim https://github.com/asvetliakov/vscode-neovim > This extension uses a full embedded Neovim instance, no more half-complete VIM emulation! VSCode's native functionality is used for insert mode and editor commands, making the best use of both editors. I like lots of things about VSCode, but there are inefficiencies with editing that just drive me bananas so I keep falling back to good old familiar MacVim. For instance, line wrapping, auto-indenting, and mouse-select-then-rewrap in comments — comment support in the Vim ecosystem seems to have been designed by and for people who really care about good documentation, while I have to work much harder to get my comments and docs to look good when editing with VSCode. Hopefully the mechanism of embedding a full NeoVim instance will allow for a moe-or-less feature-complete Vim editing experince.
cassepipe 5y ago
There is also Onivim although it is not 1.0 yet. Development is financed through selling licenses but it is open source and you can build it yourself. Development has stalled when the main dev got a job some months but there are apparently still people willing to develop it. https://www.onivim.io/ https://www.onivim.io/
- halostatue 5y ago
  Oni2 is not vim. It does not act like vim. It uses neither Vimscript nor Lua, but instead Javascript (VSCode-based extensions). I paid for an Oni2 licence and regret it, because it isn’t what I want, which is a MacVim.app wrapper for neovim. If you like MacVim.app, there is _absolutely no GUI that is acceptable_ for neovim. I understand why, and I’m not interested in taking on the development myself. But until someone makes a GUI that is as well-integrated with macOS as MacVim.app, I will be using vim and not neovim.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

thayne 5y ago

In addition to the fact that there are guis for neovim, neovim in the terminal does support mouse interaction as well (assuming your terminal emulator supports it, which should be the case for most modern terminals).

rectang 5y ago
I just tried out nvim in the MacOS Terminal, and a couple of things didn't work right away. First, clicking on a location didn't set the cursor. Especially when editing large files, I like to scroll in MacVim, click to set the cursor and then start typing. While I can do things like note the line number and jump, or scroll by moving the cursor with key commands, I find those less efficient. Second, selecting text using the mouse didn't produce a selection that Vim knew about. I use this feature all the time in MacVim, to produce a visual selection which I then rewrap using `gq`, filter by piping the selection through an autoformatter like `rustfmt`, etc. Again, I can do this using keyboard navigation exclusively to make visual selections, but I find it easier to select using the mouse.
- thayne 5y ago
  Interesting, all of those things work for me with alacritty, kitty, gnome terminal, etc. Maybe it is a limitation of MacOS Terminal? Or you need to explicitly enable `set mouse=a`?
  - 1_player 5y ago
    Mouse support isn't enabled by default, on any terminal. You need set mouse=a
    - rectang 5y ago
      Thank you, that solves the issue! This seems to be something in Vim rather than a NeoVim-specific setting, as I tried the same thing with the standard Vim and it worked the same. The scrolling feel in the Terminal isn't as smooth as MacVim, but it's still pretty good.

dummy_physicist 5y ago

You can give VimR[0] a try, I don't know what mouse features you use on MacVim, but that was the most pleasing GUI version of vim/neovim I've used. [0]: https://github.com/qvacua/vimr https://github.com/qvacua/vimr

rectang 5y ago
I've just installed it and started playing around. On first open, a lot of the interface was unreadable because VimR seemed to be assuming a dark background, but I use a white background. `set bg=light` didn't fix it. `colorScheme=PaperColor` fixed it incidentally because it didn't find the color scheme and reverted to something legible, haha. Next, I tried to set the font size for the navigator to something bigger because my eyes aren't that great. Although I can use `set guifont` to set the editor area font, the navigation area doesn't change. Presumably there's some way to fix it, I just haven't found it yet. VimR looks cool and I really like having the navigator there IDE-style, but it seems like there will be a period of adjustment. Nothing new for someone accustomed to Vim, haha. The main IDE-style features I've been going without in my ordinary day-to-day editing with MacVim are the autocompletion, suggestion, and hover-to-show-documentation. (I've started using ALE which is helpful but needs some tweaking before it's really usable.) It might be possible to get those with either MacVim or NeoVim, and it would be worth the configuration to set them up if so.
- petepete 5y ago
  Have you tried coc? Despite the repo name it works with regular vim too and is definitely the easiest way to get completion and other LSP functionality (jumping to definitions, doc previews, error highlighting etc). https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim

sigzero 5y ago

Yeah, there are a bazillion UIs (and most have stopped being updated) but nothing that comes with like vim/gvim. I might have looked at neovim if there was a neovim/gneovim but that isn't the case. I am okay with Lua. I am okay with Vimscript and Vimscript9. So neither of those is a pusher for me.