macvim VS neovim

I sure hope mainline Vim isn't dead. I keep trying NeoVim but I prefer using Vim in a GUI and no NeoVim GUI I've found has the level of polish that MacVim [1] has. VimR [2] comes close but keep finding myself going back to MacVim.

[1] https://macvim.org/

You should file an issue at https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/issues/. As long as you provide enough info to help other people help you, you will get a response.

This is already part of the official Vim (through the patches). The various Linux distributions and MacOS ship Vim with various patches. So this will be available whenever these distributions decide to include this patch. If you want to use the latest Vim without waiting for the official distribution, you can download it from: Windows: https://github.com/vim/vim-win32-installer/releases MacOS: https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/releases Linux: You can build the latest sources.

Get it there

The Mac Vim repository is synced up to Vim 9.0.0001 (https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/commit/adfe7be38282da7d772cca025ebbe5080085ef6f). If you have compiler installed in your system, you can build the sources. I am not sure why the corresponding release package is not made available.

gVim (only on windows/linux) with a minimal config is my preferred. Fast but a few powerful built-in vim features like search, replace, syntax highlighting, spellchecking, auto-indent etc. It loads in about 1.5s on my machine and renders the text nicely.

Maybe take a look at https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim on mac, perhaps someone can comment about the state of macvim?

Mac Vim - editing text / code

vim (aka Vi IMproved) is a highly efficient text editor that has inspired other editors like it, most notably MacVim (which I will refer to as vim from here on) and gVim.

As a software engineer, choosing and understanding your text editor is important part of your work, as it impacts your productivity and workflow efficiency. It's like choosing the perfect tool for any trade - you need to know what tool to use and how to use it effectively if you want to excel. For me, I use Neovim as my editor and I have been using it for a little over a year now.

This got me thinking about my recent pivot, my switch to Neovim by way of LazyVim to write most of my code, and using tmux to keep terminal states alive after closing a session.

Neovim: Make sure you have Neovim installed on your system. You can check the official website for installation instructions: https://neovim.io/ Git: We'll be using Git to clone the LazyVim starter pack. If you don't have Git, you can download it from https://git-scm.com/downloads

There are several ways to install Neovim. This wiki provides several guidelines on how to install Neovim.

All these thoughts I've shared, I would have them on occasion - but ever since I switched to Linux and Neovim, my curiosity has been through the roof. Switching over to Neovim and Linux was a not so fun weekend of configuration and spending half a day getting my work's local dev environment running on my new OS (which no one has tested development on). But I now have a deeper understanding of the tools I use, and have a text editor configured to be the most optimal for the way I want to use it.