
Killersheep – Silly game to show off the new features of Vim 8.2 - gilad
https://github.com/vim/killersheep
======
nickjj
Floating windows is kind of a big deal.

Imagine not having a full screen spell check suggestion window, but instead a
little context menu that pops up where you can pick a suggestion while still
being able to read the original buffer that you're trying to spell check. Sort
of like what Sublime Text had forever.

Or little snippets of helpful text for git specific details or inline
documentation for auto-complete.

I've only been using Vim for about 8 months but floating windows is something
you severely miss having previously used other editors like VSCode. Now with
them in tact, it will unlock all sorts of great features and UI wins. I wonder
how long it will take for plugins to start adopting it.

~~~
Jestar342
I'm a newbie vim user, but my friends and colleagues that have been using it
for years have been professing for years that floating windows are a
distraction. That part of vim's appeal is the raw and undisturbed viewport.
Not now though. These floating windows are like the second coming.

~~~
donio
It's a preference. These have been available for Emacs in various forms for a
while but I much prefer side info (from lsp and the like) to pop up in another
buffer and only when I ask for it.

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YeGoblynQueenne
Gameplay video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A33pDTAFtdY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A33pDTAFtdY)

~~~
as-j
If you want to skip the install, and misc setup, and just see the game:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A33pDTAFtdY&t=1m23s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A33pDTAFtdY&t=1m23s)

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dmortin
Vim users were laughing when emacs had games. Who's laughing now?

~~~
StavrosK
Everyone.

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philjackson
What's the deal with Neovim these days? Are people migrating or is Vim still
the go to... Vim?

~~~
bachmeier
I view it as a Perl 5/Perl 6 thing. I don't want to invest in Vim, because
supposedly Neovim is the future. I don't want to invest in Neovim, because
it's still being developed, and with the way plugins are created using Message
Pack, it seems like it has to be slow. My response: do other things with my
time.

~~~
lizmat
Please note that there is no longer a Perl 5 / Perl 6 thing, as Perl 6 has
been renamed to Raku ([https://raku.org](https://raku.org) using the #rakulang
tag on social media). How this would apply to the Vim / Neovim situation, I'm
not sure. With regards to slowness: over the past years, Raku has gained
orders of magnitude in speed in almost all areas of the system.

~~~
bachmeier
> How this would apply to the Vim / Neovim situation, I'm not sure.

Because year after year, the new version of Perl was supposedly on the way.
After they pretty much killed the language by having a new version that wasn't
ready and nobody wanting to invest in the old version, they decided to salvage
what they could of their userbase. I'm seeing an exact repeat (from the view
of outsiders) with Vim.

~~~
thayne
There are a lot of differences between vim/neovim and perl 5/6:

1\. When Neovim came along, vim had stagnated. Many features (notably async)
in vim 8 probably would not be there if neovim didn't exist. 2\. Neovim is
"ready". The only feature classic vim has that is really missing from neovim
is a really solid GUI (or maybe I just haven't found it yet). And at least for
me, the TUI features make running it in a terminal fine. 3\. Neovim has a very
high level of compatibility with classic vim. Migrating from vim to neovim
generally doesn't require changing the config very much if it all. Most
plugins work on both. Many patches from vim are carried over to neovim, etc.
It's even possible to use the same config for both neovim and classic vim, so
you can easily switch between them.

The biggest concern, I think, is that there is some divergence in the APIs for
new features, which requires a little bit more work for plugin maintainers to
support both. And without any real dependency system for plugins, it's more
complicated to distribute a compatibility layer. (and polyfills are impossible
since you can't have all-lowercase user-defined function names in vim)

At this point you can mostly think of neovim and classic vim as two
implementations of the same thing. Both are innovating, and ideas are shared
between them, but sometimes they have slightly different APIs for new or
experimental features, but hopefully those apis converge over time.

------
1996
Good new features. I'm waiting for a fix letting 'SpecialKey highlighting
overrules syntax highlighting'

[https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/18768/highlighting-
ta...](https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/18768/highlighting-tabs-
trailing-space-and-non-breaking-space-by-colors-not-chars)

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weinzierl
Wow, vim is now a game engine too;-) Seriously, I'm really happy that Vim is
alive and is developed further.

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knolax
I looked up a Twitter demo of how the new floating window feature is going to
be used [0] and my only reaction is "I hope this doesn't get used by any core
feature of the editor in the future". There's something about an always moving
visual element that isn't directly under my control that feels extremely
uncomfortable to me and is something I honestly didn't expect in vim. One of
my favorite things about it has always been that it took up about two columns
and a row of space to display anything that wasn't the file being edited.

[0][https://mobile.twitter.com/neovim/status/1101893773561348096...](https://mobile.twitter.com/neovim/status/1101893773561348096?lang=en)

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mellosouls
The title here made me think of Jeff Minter...

[https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep_in_Space](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep_in_Space)

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hart_russell
I haven’t followed the vim / neovim competition storyline for a couple years.

What’s the news on that front?

~~~
Spivak
In theory the two editors are closer in features than they have been in the
past but in practice neovim feels like a superset with unique plug-ins and a
more active community of people working on them.

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NilsIRL
What's the point of having sound in vim?

What are possible use cases?

Can't a plugin developer do this externally?

This also brings the question of why having a GUI?

~~~
spicymaki
Sound could be useful for accessibility.

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matt_the_bass
Curious what Bill Joy would think about this.

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sufyanadam
Just use Emacs with evil mode, much better editing experience and you have all
these features already. For ones you don't, just code it up in a few
functions.

~~~
OrgNet
> For ones you don't, just code it up in a few functions.

why waste that time instead of using vim?

~~~
sufyanadam
> why waste that time instead of using vim?

That's a fair point, but this situation rarely occurs because someone else
likely has already written those functions before you, and adding it into
emacs is as easy as `M-x package-install; PACKAGE`

