From QED to Neovim
5 comments
·March 15, 2025kaycebasques
l00sed
I started from Vim and ended up migrating my dotfiles to Lua. I was really glad when I bit the bullet because I was able to keep most of my favorite functionality but start using more of the modern Lua-base plugins. Lazy.nvim is a really great package manager— super simple.
I ended up stealing some LSP config from AstroNvim or another Nvim "distro". I've never tried committing to one of those prebuilds though. I was always hacking at my own configs. I do like to skim some of the code though because they are generally implementing much better design patterns. I'm sure that the community will do a better job than me with Lua 9/10...
The obsessive dotfile management does help to give you a deep understanding of your editor though— I will say that.
ggm
Brushing over teco feels a bit .. odd given its role in Emacs but this is the vim family story.
Dec 10 had SOS which was an ed-like line editor. And a port of qed IIRC. It had a concept of a viewport into a file with lines longer than 80 chars, other editors did folding but this one did scrolling in ascii. Emacs now does similar. Gosling Emacs was nice before gnu. Very simple cross file macro "do this sequence of commands" mode. Vi/ex used buffers and @execute to write programs the gosling Emacs was more "do it once then ask the editor to redo it again and again"
Nvi and Keith Bostic deserves telling too. Kind of died Midstream getting i8n and sub Windows fitted in.
The ed/sed/grep/awk unity over the syntax of the regex cannot be overstated. One investment in a syntax which embodied semantic intent in pattern match. The uplift into ex/vi was a no brainer.
l00sed
Yes, I could have been more equitable for sure. Maybe I can do a better Emacs deep-dive someday.
I'll have to also look up SOS— thanks for mentioning! Haven't heard of Nvi, but that looks interesting. Thanks for sharing those. I'll have to make some edits to the post. I keep getting good add-ins like that. Love learning more about this stuff.
ilrwbwrkhv
I've been using anvil. A modern acme inspired editor.
AstroNvim was love at first sight for me a couple weeks ago. The AstroCommunity Rust pack gave me a super robust Rust development environment with literally just a couple minutes of setup. But as mentioned, I've only been using it for a couple weeks at this point. https://astronvim.com/