From QED to Neovim
9 comments
·March 15, 2025kaycebasques
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/
bayesianbot
Just trowing out another similar, LazyVim[1]. I tried different neovim and emacs configurations over few years until stumbling on LazyVim and have been really happy with it for quite a while now - everything works out of the box, easy to add stuff and reasonably good documentation.
linsomniac
I've been using AstroVim for a couple months, LunarVim before that; switched because they stopped maintaining Lunar. I had been carrying some vimrc files around for decades before that and got tired of having a partially working set of the more advance features.
With these packages, keeping as stock as I could stand, I've got a great set of LSP and advanced editing features with minimal effort. It's been great.
I've also got helix set up with the LSP settings.
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.
marshray
When I was small, my dad would bring home a terminal with a thermal printer and acoustic coupler modem. This would have been mid-1970's.
I remember QED. I suppose it was my first editor.
ilrwbwrkhv
I've been using anvil. A modern acme inspired editor.
I've now watched people go from Sublime to Atom to VSCode to Cursor. Truly it's wild how much value I've gotten out of sticking with just Vim and occasionally trimming my config.
I have no desire to move to Neovim. The Neovim community seems hell bent on turning Vim into another Emacs kitchen sink style ecosystem where no one values moderation and everyone is installing 100+ plugins they don't need. I haven't seen a single Neovim feature that actually helps me get work done more efficiently than how I already do it with Vim. Neovim feels like the first step since ed where the lineage has truly gone in the wrong direction.