this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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People that use Neovim really like Neovim | More than any other code editor, people using it want to keep using it | 2024 Stacked Overflow Developer Survey (programming.dev)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Based on answers to the following question:

Which development environments did you use regularly over the past year, and which do you want to work with over the next year? Please check all that apply.

Neovim is the most admired code editor in the 2024 Stacked Overflow Developer Survey

Source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#admired-and-desired-new-collab-tools-desire-admire

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Discord as the 2nd most desired sync comm. tool with 71% admire score

fucking zoomers

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Discord is designed and implemented better than all of the other options I've used. I think I've used 10 of them.

[–] Batbro 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Could I ask why? I've got an idea for a competitor

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

There are many small details that make Discord better, possibly because their focus is on making multi-modal communication as rich as possible. There are many things they can improve upon but, they're miles ahead of the competition right now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Zulip is really neat. Telegram is easy to set up and has a native desktop client and scales well. Self-hosted XMPP is nice, as as the name says, it's extensible. Mumble has a mid interface but great performance and privacy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

just note that actually very few of them have native apps so... and mind digital sovereignty and privacy. also discord doesn't work well outside of chromium, contributing to this dreadful web monopolization.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Sunk cost fallacy lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Stockholm Syndrome tbh

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Love how the lowest 3 are Eclipse, NetBeans, and Code::Blocks

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Code::Blocks is a step up from Bloodshed DevCpp, which was outdated the moment we started using it, but our teacher was a hardcore "I only need a netbook with Windows XP to program my games" kind of guy. He loved programming games for game systems that were older than him 😂. Good on him for being content to work on a 10" screen though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Those are the 3 I was forced to use in Uni. Only one missing is Bluejay

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

These companies really do have a competition going for who can make the shittiest Java IDE, huh

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

At the time (pre-Jetbrains) Eclipse was pretty good. Haven't been back lately, but it was a top tier IDE.

I think the others are all closer to pet-projects, they are basically a text editor with a run button, I even wrote one myself for tcl. I just never got the chance to inflict it on some poor uni students :D

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

I'm not surprised at Helix's numbers, either. I wish we could sort by Admired; I think the picture would be more interesting.

Using my newly patented VisualSort, it looks like it'd go:

  1. NeoVim
  2. Visual Studio Code
  3. Rider
  4. DataGrip
  5. IPython
  6. Goland
  7. Vim
  8. Helix ... 27 others

So, in the top 22%. And I think some of the others are cheating & cutting themselves short at the same time, because vim and nvim are fairly indistinguishable, and isn't Goland based on IntelliJ?

What's weird is that I've never heard of Rider or DataGrip[^1], yet Kakoune isn't even on the list.

Sad to see Netbeans sink so far, though; back in the day, when I was a Java developer, it was my favorite, being far lighter weight than Eclipse and having a really decent WYSIWYG GUI designer. Nobody uses Java for desktop apps anymore, though, do they?

[^1] Edit: oh. .NET, and SQL. Well, I guess you could consider both to be programming languages if you squint a bit.

Edit #2: surveys are hard, but I really take exception to their OS survey, which they sum up as "windows is the most popular," and then they have Linux broken up into 5 major distributions, and then yet another catch-all for "other distribution." Windows is just "Windows," not "Windows 11," "Windows 10," "Windows XP," and "other Windows" (although they do break out WSL). And that's not even counting Android. If you add up all of the Linuxes, it's more popular than Windows (by this survey).

Seriously, who wrote this?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Vim and Neovim are fairly indistinguishable

You mean apart from being able to write plugins in Lua instead of Vimscript?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Regular vim has that (as a compile option, like most of its features).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm sure there are more differences; nvim has plugins written in every language. One reason I stepped away from it is because, for development, I was using a fair number of plugins, and i noticed the starting nvim would launch nodejs, a Python runtime, a Java VM, Lua runtimes... I started to feel as if I might as well be using emacs.

So, yes: you're right. NeoVim has more features than plain vim, including a dozen different plugin managers and the ability to write plugins in almost any language. I meant that, from an editing modality, they're very similar.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

neovim can be an entire IDE. it's like vscode vs visual studio

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

PDE: Personalized Development Environment

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

[^1] Edit: oh. .NET, and SQL. Well, I guess you could consider both to be programming languages if you squint a bit.

I'm hoping they'll have a separate Query Language list. We need to know more query languages because SQL has wayyy too much power, IMO.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

I thought notepad++ was a joke

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Neovim is rather wonderful. I haven't yet seen good plugins for OpenAPI specs, so, I'm stuck with VSCode for that but, it really is my go-to.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

why is vscodium listed separately by the way, it's literally built from exactly the same code as vscode, just without the proprietary licensing, ms branding and using openvsix extension gallery by default

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

I would guess to see how many people go out of their way to use vscodium over vscode.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (3 children)

This popped in my feed. What is it? I'm interested.

[–] ScreaminOctopus 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's a fork of Vim but the codebase has been cleaned up to remove complexity due to legacy hardware support. It allows the use of Lua for configuration and plugin implementation instead of VimScript, which allows plugins to be written in a sanely designed, high performance scripting language, allowing plugin developers to build more complex plugins more easily without dragging down editor performance (VimScript comparability is maintained though). It has a built in implementation of LSP. Plugins written in other languages can communicate with the application via a msgpack API so deciding to support other programming languages for plugin development at compile time is not necessary.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

comparability

*compatibility

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

vim but with a cult

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Soooo... vim ?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I'm not sure I know what you mean.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

THERE IS ANOTHER

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That one didn't score as high, but I think it's because it hasn't matured yet. Linux support is in beta last I heard.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Plus, an editor that isnt linux first is a super mega behemoth ick. Hard pass.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (6 children)

I must be a minority then. I tried it once - as in, I made a real, honest attempt at liking it and making it work for me - and all it managed to do is show me it's buggy and confused, and to convince me to steer well clear of it and stick to vanilla Vim.

I really really dislike Neovim.

Also, I question the vailidy of a survey in which VSCode is 13 times more "desired" - whatever that means, it's not like it's hard to procure - than VSCodium, given that VSCodium is VSCode sans the Microsoft spyware. Makes no sense to me...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I understand not liking the vim way of doing things (which seems not to be the case for you), but I've never heard anyone describe neovim as buggy. Not throwing shade, genuinely curious. What bugs did you encounter, and when was it?

Edit: I missed that you posted a link there. Interesting.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I remember that post. I'm surprised that nobody has run into that problem until now. Did you open up an issue on the Neovim GitHub repository?

I ask because I don't see one and I want try to replicate the issue. I'll report it myself if I'm able to.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I don't care enough to bother, to be honest. Neovim, like Vim, is just a tool to me. It failed me, I moved on. I have more interesting things to spend my time on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I care, because what you found is a bug. And I think it would be best to document the intended behavior and a temporary work around, and then fix the bug. So I'm doing just that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

"Desired" and "Admired" are very strangle labels, it like the question(s) might have been:

Which development environments did you use regularly over the past year, and which do you want to work with over the next year? Please check all that apply.

In which case VSCodes high "desired" score just means that it was widely used?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

I don't know how to open that post on my instance so I can reply to it, but if you're willing to give it another shot, I figured out how to get indentexpr= to apply to all buffers from init.vim, using an auto command. Add this to your init.vim:

autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile,VimEnter * set indentexpr=
set indentexpr=
[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You can get to the post using this link: https://threadiverse.link/lemmy.sdf.org/post/18253296

It's awesome that you were able to find a solution!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Thanks for this tip!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I think I found a more direct way. I'm still looking into the details though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Ah, thanks for your efforts, you're very kind. But I'm done with Neovim. It's already wasted more of my time that it was ever going to be worth.

I wanted to try Neovim to give Treesitter a spin. In the end, I went with something much simpler that works immediately and without drama in Vim and does what I really wanted all along: simple, dumb autocompletion.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

given that VSCodium is VSCode sans the Microsoft spyware

Can't use Pylance in VSCodium /rant

It's one of vscode's killer features (at least for Python), and I can't live without it (I tried).

Yes, I don't like it either; I wish I could use Pylance in Neovim or anything else LSP-enabled, but it is what it is.