4 ms·
As someone who has been using vim for 5 years and neovim for 2 years, what sort of learning material (books, videos) would you recommend to learn about vim inte
by azemetre 4y ago
As someone who has been using vim for 5 years and neovim for 2 years, what sort of learning material (books, videos) would you recommend to learn about vim internals and subsequently neovim internals?
I would love to contribute but I'm mostly a webdev, but I'd love to take a year or so to learn and hopefully contribute throughout the rest of my life. It's just so hard to start or learn.
The material doesn't even have to be directly related to vim, I'd like to learn more about how and why text editors work and some of the common concerns when building one.
- Beltalowda 4y agoDepends what you want to do. The editor itself is in C; I don't think there's any "learning materials" available for the (Neo)Vim internals specifically, so you just gotta learn C. Overall, it's not that hard IMO: I'm not a very experienced C programmer, and I managed to get some patches into Vim. Neovim also uses Lua in various parts for its internals, but I'm not very familiar with Neovim. If you want to work on things like language support (syntax files, some completions) then most of that is in VimScript; "Learn VimScript the hard way" is a good place to get started.
- curun1r 4y agoIt will require you to venture into C land, but I found the walkthrough of the code for the kilo editor [0] to be very informative. It’ll hit on a number of the basic concerns that a console-based editor needs to solve. Any vi/emacs impl will obviously be a lot more complex, but a simpler starting point is better for learning. [0] https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/ https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/