4 ms·

What if those external utilities are not available? Which might very well be the case if you run Vim on Windows. It is better to have atleast some fall back ca

What if those external utilities are not available? Which might very well be the case if you run Vim on Windows. It is better to have atleast some fall back capabilities(for searching across files, searching within files, sorting etc) build in.

wruza 2y ago
https://www.msys2.org/ https://www.msys2.org/ Edit: just realized it always posed itself as a “building platform”, lol. It really is a full-blown GNU system that works on windows. As in GNU/Linux, but there’s no linux kernel. All the /usr/bin tools are there, including pacman as a package manager (from Arch). You can install virtually everything from there.
- billfruit 2y ago
  Now you need a whole userland to get basic functionality of the editor. Who will vett the correctness and suitability and efficiency of the 3rd party user-land? Notwithstanding that the third party userland is possibly not necessarily, since the windows userland most likely has all the features needed for Vim to make these functionalities work. Since the editor is intended to be a multi-plaform product, it is better if atleast a windows userland based mechanism could be provided on windows platform, if the mechanisms could not be achieved through an inbuilt platform-agnostic manner. What if you need a "portable" ( in the windows sense of the term, it means that the program can be used without need for an installation process) version of the editor? I think it all is a huge time sink on the end user, who would instead get some usefull progress done on their projects.
  - wruza 2y ago
    Agreed, ideally a multi-platform editor should include all the features an OS might have, or at least use a compatibility layer that equalizes all functionality and paradigms over all supported platforms.
  - tcoff91 2y ago
    If you do dev on windows you should mostly use WSL.
    - BeetleB 2y ago
      I'm a Linux guy. Have had that as my primary OS for over twenty years. At work, though, I've been doing dev work primarily in Windows for over a decade. Never needed WSL. (Maybe because I use Emacs? I dunno)
      - billfruit 2y ago
        Emacs suffers some on windows too, because it also depends on external utilities for some functionality. For example grep-find depends on external grep program which is not bundles in, and on windows, the operation will simply fail.
    - billfruit 2y ago
      I think experienced windows devs would use and recommend windows libs/userland over WSL. May because WSL becomes a huge dependency and many windows boxes don't have it installed, whereas windows userland is always available.
ttyprintk 2y ago
I don’t think that effort is necessary. The author likely has git, which provides a userland. And she/he is talking about gvim.exe, so is not restricted in what she/he can choose to install, and by now, might be using nvim-qt.exe.

wruza 2y ago

https://www.msys2.org/ https://www.msys2.org/ Edit: just realized it always posed itself as a “building platform”, lol. It really is a full-blown GNU system that works on windows. As in GNU/Linux, but there’s no linux kernel. All the /usr/bin tools are there, including pacman as a package manager (from Arch). You can install virtually everything from there.

billfruit 2y ago
Now you need a whole userland to get basic functionality of the editor. Who will vett the correctness and suitability and efficiency of the 3rd party user-land? Notwithstanding that the third party userland is possibly not necessarily, since the windows userland most likely has all the features needed for Vim to make these functionalities work. Since the editor is intended to be a multi-plaform product, it is better if atleast a windows userland based mechanism could be provided on windows platform, if the mechanisms could not be achieved through an inbuilt platform-agnostic manner. What if you need a "portable" ( in the windows sense of the term, it means that the program can be used without need for an installation process) version of the editor? I think it all is a huge time sink on the end user, who would instead get some usefull progress done on their projects.
- wruza 2y ago
  Agreed, ideally a multi-platform editor should include all the features an OS might have, or at least use a compatibility layer that equalizes all functionality and paradigms over all supported platforms.
- tcoff91 2y ago
  If you do dev on windows you should mostly use WSL.
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    I'm a Linux guy. Have had that as my primary OS for over twenty years. At work, though, I've been doing dev work primarily in Windows for over a decade. Never needed WSL. (Maybe because I use Emacs? I dunno)
    - billfruit 2y ago
      Emacs suffers some on windows too, because it also depends on external utilities for some functionality. For example grep-find depends on external grep program which is not bundles in, and on windows, the operation will simply fail.
  - billfruit 2y ago
    I think experienced windows devs would use and recommend windows libs/userland over WSL. May because WSL becomes a huge dependency and many windows boxes don't have it installed, whereas windows userland is always available.

ttyprintk 2y ago

I don’t think that effort is necessary. The author likely has git, which provides a userland. And she/he is talking about gvim.exe, so is not restricted in what she/he can choose to install, and by now, might be using nvim-qt.exe.