I feel like it's selling point is supposed to be: hey we got a cool terminal specifically configured to work with nvim and all it's cool features + some more out of the box. No need to reconfigure your default terminal to support ligatures/emojis/powerline/... that could be a pain in the butt, especially if you like st terminal or something. Or if you just use default gnome terminal without any configuration yet, ... And don't take this "out of the box" feature lightly, when you just want to start working on something, all the sensible configuration being done for you is huuuuge thing if you just want to make some work done, so neovide + lunar vim if that's possible would be great for that
loving these spicy "i don't get it" videos. i could see myself using neovide for focused writing/editing with the visual cues and smoothness it provides. it feels like going from 30 fps to 60 fps.
My experience and understanding is Neovide makes it easier on your eyes and to help not get lost (which at least happens plenty to me when editing configs). The smooth scrolling keeps the panning text from being jarring and the cursor animation attracts your eyes to where it goes, i.e. when your finding specific text in a document or just going from line to line.
neovide is't a separate vim version, it is a neovim interface, like a terminal made specifically for neovim. And of course it has support for legatures, themes, fonts, smooth scroll etc. - it's a frontend for neovim, it even has support for connecting to a remote neovim server. And sometimes you want a different font in neovim from the terminal one.
As Linux users, it's perfectly fair to not "get it" with Neovide. I use nvim and vim from the terminal on my personal Linux machines and I would say it gives a better user experience than their GUI run-time counterparts. Some distros even create desktop entries for nvim and vim so that you could right click and edit a file from a GUI file manager. On the other side of it though, I'm also someone who has to use a Windows machine for work, due to a few specific tools. In this scenario, Neovide and GVim are great quick & easy ways to get a vim runtime up and going without having to go through shenanigans like installing WSL, running it through Powershell, creating Registry bodges so that you can open Vim via a powershell prompt and then edit a file through the file explorer… ya' know stuff like that. Neovide and GVim comes with an installer, it creates startmenu entries, and it allows you to right click --> edit a file through the File Explorer immediately with no additional work necessary. Copy your config, replace how the font selection is written syntactically and bam! You have a quick vim run-time on a system you're not all too familiar with (in my case, Windows) I think sometimes (and I'm guilty of this as well) it's easy to forget that not everyone wants to tinker with their system nor do they care how something gets up and running as long as they can start working (developers included). We also tend to forget that there are Vim users out there that actually prefer to use windows and/or has never used Linux but likes using nvim/vim (look at all the Google Summer of Code teens 😆). Just because it doesn't make sense to us, doesn't mean that it wouldn't make sense or be incredibly useful and convenient for somebody else. Neovide and GVim is a great solution of you want to have Vim, quick and easy on "alternate" operating systems 😆 I would NEVER need that on my Linux machines, but I would ALWAYS want that on the few Windows machines that I need to run. It's always case per case with software 🤷🏽♂️ and that's what makes it great.
tbf, i never opened neovim from the desktop entry, because from the terminal you can specify the files you want to open, and navigating in neovim is one of those thing neovim totally sucks at. That's why i use the terminal to move around and then i run neovim from inside the terminal. That's why neovim should be used in a terminal: this way you can do what neovim sucks at in the terminal instead!
I think you fundamentally misunderstand what neovide is. Neovide is NOT an alternate version of neovim, it is a gui FOR neovim. It's just a GUI, it attaches to the neovim already installed on your computer. Changing the actual functionality of neovim is not the goal and in fact would be a dealbreaker for 99% of people as it would make neovide incompatible with the plugin ecosystem and the people's existing vimrc files. It's like a terminal emulator purpose made for neovim. It's not meant to revolutionize the user experience, it's just a bunch of small improvements. Themes always display correctly, terminal emulators and multiplexers can be fiddly in that regard, powerline symbols and other font icons display with the correct offsets, popup-frames look a lot nicer than in most terminals, with rounded corners and proper thickness applied, and smooth scrolling makes things objectively easier to follow, ctrl+d/u are imo at their best with some sort of smooth scrolling. Some terminal emulators provide some of these features, but none of them have all of them, which makes neovide the best neovim experience. Not by much, but it is the best, and I don't think you can just dismiss that as pointless. Another thing, you do NOT need rust installed to get it to work. Rust is a compiled language and neovide is statically linked. It's just a single executable or package in your distro repos. Edit: btw smooth scrolling works only with multigrid enabled. The documentation for smooth scrolling is litterally two sentences, one of them describes how to get it to work. You cannot honestly tell me you couldn't be bothered to read that before producing a hitpiece.
yeah, true that. 0:38 > "Neovide is a GUI _version of_ neovim" > _"you fundamentally misunderstand .... Neovide is NOT an alternate version of neovim, it is a gui FOR neovim. It's just a GUI, it attaches to the neovim already installed on your computer."_
awesome. yeah, terminals are fiddly. i have tried mintty, wezterm, alacritty, conemu... all of these come with their own challenges to running TUIs. > _"It's like a terminal emulator purpose made for neovim. ... terminal emulators and multiplexers can be fiddly in that regard, ... Some terminal emulators provide some of these features, but none of them have all of them, which makes neovide the best neovim experience. "_ [features like:] themes, powerline symbols and other font icons display, their offsets, popup-frames rounded corners, smooth scrolling
There is a note. Note: multigrid must be enabled for this to work. (smooth scrolling and blurred windows). Multigrid is disabled by default, so smooth scrolling is disabled too.
Mate, I agree with you of course, but let me give you a real solid reason you didn't consider: Complex KeyMappings!! This is true for any gui frontend btw. In neovide you can map key combos that are very hard/hacky or just not possible with regular terminals, for ex , , etc. It works like a charm This reason alone made me switch to neovide
I don't get why vim exists when u have emacs. Emacs has a programming language in it, so u can just tell emacs to do whatever vim does. Unfortunately vim is the default editor on cl and the man pages use vim shortcuts.
Emacs is bigger and has more bells and whistles out of the box, and most people does not need it. But neovim has a lot of bells and whistles as well. Neovim these days the "challenger" of Emacs. Don't get me wrong I love Emacs and would fight anyone who says it's not good.
@@attilasedon9593 That's a false dichotomy. Emacs is a programmable text editor. Neovim is a text editor with an extension language. It's a completely different mindset.
The main thing about Neovide is that it is just a nice looking, smooth and GPU accelerated Neovim-dedicated terminal emulator. If you use Alacritty, Kitty or Wezterm it doesn't stand out that much in terms of smoothness. If you were to compare it with Gnome Terminal or any other DE standard terminal (or Windows Terminal as people mention in the comments), the difference in user experience is really significant. And I guess a lot of users come from there. I tried to use it, but it in i3 (at least for me) it has problems with drawing the Neovim TUI in the right size - I have to resize the window in order to make it redraw everything correctly, which kind of defeats the purpose of using a tiling WM + Kitty is very close in terms of smoothness, so... I just went back to good old terminal. And in the end only thing I don't have in Kitty is the fancy cursor animations.
But the fancy animations are not only on the cursor ? I like the smooth scrolling animation, the rotate animation, windows split animation, windows resize animation
I like having a dedicated app, since so much of my time is spent editing text. (Same reason I use nativefier on some websites) I do have to restart it occasionally, because i run into rough spots with my lspconfig when I've opened up too many different projects in one neovim instance
The smoothness is *really* nice. And for me a slightly animated cursor is honestly a feedback change that feels like going from a squishy laptop keyboard to a mechanical keyboard. The only thing is I wish I had the option to ctrl+z back into a terminal and fg to resume. If it had a basic terminal emulator seamlessly integrated I think I'd switch to it as my default IDE but for now as an external editor for game engines it's fantastic. I just wish I could use it without ToggleTerm, but I am starting to get used to doing that so i may well be a full convert soon. Smooth scrolling also makes a huge difference when you're staring at and jumping around code for hours.
Neovide seems to exist mostly because “why not”. Emacs GUI is nice because it’s a super configurable editor with the benefits of being graphical (non-monospaced fonts, variable line height, in-line LaTeX and image rendering, etc.), but evil mode (vim-keys) makes emacs basically a gui vim anyways. The only advantage to a proper gui neovim right now would be using lua (better config language imo) instead of elisp
Neovim in the terminal, for me, had font issues Neovide fixes all of that for me And yes, i _have_ installed the entirety of nerd fonts. It fixed some fonts in neovim. But not all of it
I loved neovide but I agree that it's missing a UI menu to setup some UI things that only affect neovide. Seems silly adding neovide settings to my main nvim file.
My theory is, it's an editor inside a terminal window for people that don't have set up a terminal environment (which of course you have if you're on linux, but on Windows, it takes work to set up. What bugs me more is the IDE in the name, because they do nothing to offer any addons that make this an IDE. You still have to do all the neovim customization to get IDE features. The cursor jumping is the whole project, there's no explanation why they would have a dozen screenshots with different cursor effects on their home page.
It feels like you're saying: "I heard of a company which makes tractors. They say those thing are pretty strong and have big tires with a lot of grip. But they are also really slow and expensive. I'm not sure why I would need such a thing because I have a car. I don't get it." Some people just prioritize other features as you. Besides that, great video :)
What's interesting is w3m "supports" images properly in xterm (using dirty hacks and black magic) VS code can be configured both in GUI and text file file, which makes it super cool. Maybe it's just pet project for fun?
You don't get it, because you already have a very well setup terminal, with nvim inside. For those who don't need a complexity of Alacritty - Neovide works very well.
I use nano, and you can get line numbering and wrapping and all that stuff, I've used vim and etc, but just pressing Ctrl x and enter is easier than writing wq! or however it's done. You should do a video on just writing straight from terminal cat >> EOF >filename and you just type until you're done and then type EOF and it'll make the file. Something like that anyways, and I'm sure there's an easier way from cli but that always works for me. Love your vids man, keep it up.
I use nano also and I agree with you on that. I have been playing around with Micro (nano clone) but I seam to use nano all the time... Lol Other than that is is Sublime-Text... 🙂 LLAP 🖖
@@Bruces-Eclectic-World I used sublime text for years, and nano when I had to edit a file in a terminal, then I tried micro but it turns me off that it's not working as expected in many ways. So now I'm using helix, it's more intuitive than vim and is useable out of the box, great features that would require many plugins in vim, also great default settings! Try it out, it's the easiest modal editor I tried, after going through the tutor I'm already productive with it in one day :)
May sound very lame to some but Neovide’s cool animations made me switch to neovim from Vscode few months back. Also Neovide has better color support than Mac terminal and I iTerm2 hogs memory. Tmux + Terminal + Neovide works for me very well.
It's like these devs were going: "Hey, you know how everybody hates that Neovim is not bloated? No? Well too bad because we are gonna bloat it anyway". They completely missed the point of Vim and the bajillion macros that it offers which is to minimize the time you have to spend fiddling around with a mouse and in between keystrokes. Even going so far as to use the Esc or Arrow keys is too much for some Vim users and they expect people to essentially give up everything that is good in Vim for the sake of mouse support which you shouldn't use in Vim either way. Like, uhm... okay? I guess?
Just started using neovide. For me the selling point was the startup time. The only other "terminal" which starts that fast is `st` I wanted to have the same experience on windows (sadly it's still slow there, but thats probably due to company security software n stuff). Anyhow yeah, neovide gives you the cursor, and while typing it's just smoother than when you type in the terminal, it's just more pleasant for the eye and IMO thats enough for people to use it, and also a perfectly valid reason to prefer neovide over a raw terminal.
the point of a gui for neovim is that you can open neovide from your gui file manager instead of having to open a terminal window and cd into the directory
This is kinda annoying to watch. I do not use neovide, I have never even tried it. I have 0 problems it existing or people using it. Some of the features you are "demanding", like images and bigger text on heading elements, are not something the underlying nvim supports. Emacs does, btw. Before I changed from vim to neovim I used gvim (gtk+) with every menu and toolbar removed/hidden. So it looked like a terminal window, just lots more colors. That actually hindered my transtition from vim to neovim, as I didn't find UI I was happy with, and I didn't know terminals had evolved to have 24-bit color support. I finally found some gtk UI I could live with, it has menus and toolbars but I could configure it to not show them. Since then I've moved to terminal UI, since 24-bit colors is enough for me. But there might be something in the future that makes me switch to some other UI, and it will probably not be menus and buttons. Smooth scrolling might be such a feature for me.
@@TheLinuxCast I put the word "demand" in quotes, because I know you didn't really think you demanded it, but "demanded" it. Kinda bad communication from my part, sorry for that. You are free to criticize anything and you don't need to like everything. But I reserve the same rights; I can criticize anything, including your video, and I don't need to like it.
Hey Matt. Random question. What size monitor do you use or would you recommend ? Your screen always looks nice and well adjusted size wise. I've been pulling my hair out trying to find one I like. I'm not a gamer. Just returned a 32 inch 4k and waiting on a 27 inch 2k in its place. I've spent way too much time looking at options. Hope the 27 works. Really enjoyed the i3 speed run the other day. Hope you do some other WMs in that format. Cheers
I have two. One 32" 1080p and one 27" 1080p. The 32" is a curved display from Sceptre, the other is an HP. They're fine, nothing special, but do the job.
So I was looking at the website and I went to the configuration section I saw an option for font scaling so I think it may have some kind of font scaling. The configuration examples are in vim script so just be aware of that. The option was like: let g:neovide_scale_factor = 1.0.
Awesome videos, keep up the great work! I LOVE that Tokyo Night Polybar theme. Is it possible to find that in your dotfiles? I've looked before and maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place but I can't find it.
Nice video and several valid points, though I gotta say that animated cursor in Neovide is just too cool to ignore. After a while, the long trailing tail gets annoying while jumping around, but the smooth gliding animation when one types in insert-mode is really nice to have. P.s. Actually an die-hard Emacs user, but I keep myself up-to-date with neovim/vim news just to see how it's going on the other side.
Smoothed typing animation ist the first thing I disable if I have to work in Windows with a Office program. I just can't stand it and hate it so much, that I'm wiling to enter the registry to get rid of it!
i feel the same, like you said, vim, emacs, gui text editors mark down editors etc they have different purposes. i personally use vim on terminal and i use sublime or geany for a gui text editor. and i use obsidian for mark down editing. a vim gui frontend is kinda meaningless for me, too. because there is only two different scenario that i can imagine. 1- you make a vim gui frontend and it will be the same as terminal one, and what's the purpose, you can just use in terminal then. 2- you make a vim gui frontend and you give features and advantages of being a gui app, but then it will become a gui text editor, it won't be vim anymore, so there is no purpose for it either as far as i can see. the only explanation that kinda make sense to me is if you use the vim gui frontend app on windows (like some people mentioned in other comments) because windows is not terminal oriented as linux (if you are not a developer or someone who works with what lies beneath the surface of windows system at least)
The weekly podcast: I do not get why this does not exist. Sorry to come off in an insulting way, I had to get the pun in there, but seriously speaking, what's the news with the weekly podcast?
It’s a cool project. Id imagine that whatever new APIs for the gui the nvim decides to implement are what makes or breaks the project. If you tale a look at what eMacs can do thanks to it being a gui the possibilities are endless
Hey Matt, great video as usual. After hearing you say that you wanted a markdown preview in Neovide, it got me wondering if you have ever tried the vim-instant-markdown plugin for Vim/Neovim. I use it, and I really like it a lot. It launches a browser window automatically when you start editing a markdown document in vim. It's really nice to get an instant preview of what your markdown actually looks like as you are editing it. Anyway, you might want to give it a try if you haven't already. It's been a game changer for me. Peace out and Happy Holidays.
Lots of Linux youtubers out there as well. They all basically talk about the same thing. I don't know why they do. Even so I either subscribe or I don't. That doesn't mean that I question why they bother to do it. I just appreciate that there is variety. Some of which will not make sense to me. But it does to others. Clickbait title aside. I think neovide is great to have.
I don't understand why I get so much crap for the so called click bait. First off, there are much worse examples on every other channel. Second, if you want to get any views on this platform, you titles have to be creative and grab attention. I.e. Click bait. As for Neovide, there's nothing wrong with it, other than it's not something I understand. Which is what I said in the video. I don't get it. If you do, great for you.
How about this.. Or use Neovide? That is what makes linux, and open-source software in general great. Do what you want, how you want. You can be grump all you want that people use a tool in a way different than how you want it to be used. At the end of the day, no one cares, nor should they have to.
As a bunch of people have mentioned, smooth cursor, even when just typing is a lot less fatiguing. Also you can't make terminal truly full screen, because terminal emulators cannot display fractional number of lines/columns. Open nvim in terminal and see ugly borders. Gui is just straight superior for most use cases, the exception would be on server, and when you open close hundreds of instances of nvim a day.
It's probably more targeted towards Windows users as the terminals on Windows aren't as feature-packed or performant as the terminals on *nix systems, in my experience.
My biggest problem is that byobu+neovim is overpowered. And I'll preach it till the day I day. And because terminals are so versatile (aka you couldn't literally do anything in it). Using a non terminal frontend for a terminal application is basically shooting yourself in the foot because now you've limited yourself.
Neovide is basically a terminal emulator window with a fancy cursor. Even good old Gvim provided more functionality. That's the problem with Neovim GUI wrappers: Those basically only exist because it is easy to implement Neovim in other tools. ... and ligatures are neither a terminal feature nor a GUI feature but a font feature. 😊
Personally, I don't get why neovim exists. It's not like Lua is a good programming language that would really justify this. It's not like it's any easier to use for a newbie than JavaScript is. So why then would they do it. My thought, we need an embedded programming language that's even more newb friendly and can be used for super simple and slightly complex configurations. I think I'll add that to my long list of project ideas.
Well, Neovide provides some Animation, and man, they look gorgeous. And while it's only optics, I REALLY like it. Feels so smooth! However, I'm not really digging it either. I usually use vim in a terminal, very often over ssh. Therefore it is at least inconvenient for me to use .
nvim avg load real 0m1.291s emacs avg load real 0m0.942s Average load time for vanilla emacs beats nvim every time, and emacs vanilla is much more powerful than vanilla nvim. If you use one of the many frameworks available like Doom or spartan you can increase power and efficiency with little to no increase in load time. Not true with nvim. nvim with the Spacevim config loads in 2.79, whereas emacs with Spartan with all packages including lsp, org-mode, evil, and about 15 others loads in 1.18. But yeah, nvims got animated cursors...yay.
1:57 It should take your neovim color scheme, for background you can add this to your neovim config: if vim.g.neovide then vim.api.nvim_set_hl(0, 'Normal', {bg='#2b3339'}) vim.g.neovide_transparency = 0.8 end 5:07 You haven't enabled smooth scrolling, run neovide with --multigrid flag
Can't remember if I've bored you with this before, so perhaps forgive me. I started off with 'vi' in the 90s because I had a freelance gig at a client running Un*x boxes and that's all there was. It was *such* a pain to learn that I promised myself that I never go through that pain again, and now use 'gvim' for all programming work on any platform. Hah, just saw your later comment about a settings panel. Even in gvim, which I have come to know, configure, and love, I still have to hack a .vimrc file. A competent settings panel would be amazing! Related: I'd love to see what you have in your .vimrc one day :)
I'm also on Mastodon, where I toot a lot about Linux and other things. Give me follow: fosstodon.org/@thelinuxcast
I feel like it's selling point is supposed to be: hey we got a cool terminal specifically configured to work with nvim and all it's cool features + some more out of the box. No need to reconfigure your default terminal to support ligatures/emojis/powerline/... that could be a pain in the butt, especially if you like st terminal or something. Or if you just use default gnome terminal without any configuration yet, ...
And don't take this "out of the box" feature lightly, when you just want to start working on something, all the sensible configuration being done for you is huuuuge thing if you just want to make some work done, so neovide + lunar vim if that's possible would be great for that
loving these spicy "i don't get it" videos.
i could see myself using neovide for focused writing/editing with the visual cues and smoothness it provides. it feels like going from 30 fps to 60 fps.
for me it feels like going from "240hz" to 240hz
My experience and understanding is Neovide makes it easier on your eyes and to help not get lost (which at least happens plenty to me when editing configs).
The smooth scrolling keeps the panning text from being jarring and the cursor animation attracts your eyes to where it goes, i.e. when your finding specific text in a document or just going from line to line.
neovide is't a separate vim version, it is a neovim interface, like a terminal made specifically for neovim. And of course it has support for legatures, themes, fonts, smooth scroll etc. - it's a frontend for neovim, it even has support for connecting to a remote neovim server.
And sometimes you want a different font in neovim from the terminal one.
As Linux users, it's perfectly fair to not "get it" with Neovide. I use nvim and vim from the terminal on my personal Linux machines and I would say it gives a better user experience than their GUI run-time counterparts. Some distros even create desktop entries for nvim and vim so that you could right click and edit a file from a GUI file manager. On the other side of it though, I'm also someone who has to use a Windows machine for work, due to a few specific tools. In this scenario, Neovide and GVim are great quick & easy ways to get a vim runtime up and going without having to go through shenanigans like installing WSL, running it through Powershell, creating Registry bodges so that you can open Vim via a powershell prompt and then edit a file through the file explorer… ya' know stuff like that. Neovide and GVim comes with an installer, it creates startmenu entries, and it allows you to right click --> edit a file through the File Explorer immediately with no additional work necessary. Copy your config, replace how the font selection is written syntactically and bam! You have a quick vim run-time on a system you're not all too familiar with (in my case, Windows)
I think sometimes (and I'm guilty of this as well) it's easy to forget that not everyone wants to tinker with their system nor do they care how something gets up and running as long as they can start working (developers included). We also tend to forget that there are Vim users out there that actually prefer to use windows and/or has never used Linux but likes using nvim/vim (look at all the Google Summer of Code teens 😆). Just because it doesn't make sense to us, doesn't mean that it wouldn't make sense or be incredibly useful and convenient for somebody else.
Neovide and GVim is a great solution of you want to have Vim, quick and easy on "alternate" operating systems 😆 I would NEVER need that on my Linux machines, but I would ALWAYS want that on the few Windows machines that I need to run. It's always case per case with software 🤷🏽♂️ and that's what makes it great.
Yes, I agree. I think Neovide is much more of a benefit for Windows users than for Linux users. I still kind of like it on Linux though.
tbf, i never opened neovim from the desktop entry, because from the terminal you can specify the files you want to open, and navigating in neovim is one of those thing neovim totally sucks at.
That's why i use the terminal to move around and then i run neovim from inside the terminal.
That's why neovim should be used in a terminal: this way you can do what neovim sucks at in the terminal instead!
I think you fundamentally misunderstand what neovide is. Neovide is NOT an alternate version of neovim, it is a gui FOR neovim. It's just a GUI, it attaches to the neovim already installed on your computer. Changing the actual functionality of neovim is not the goal and in fact would be a dealbreaker for 99% of people as it would make neovide incompatible with the plugin ecosystem and the people's existing vimrc files. It's like a terminal emulator purpose made for neovim. It's not meant to revolutionize the user experience, it's just a bunch of small improvements. Themes always display correctly, terminal emulators and multiplexers can be fiddly in that regard, powerline symbols and other font icons display with the correct offsets, popup-frames look a lot nicer than in most terminals, with rounded corners and proper thickness applied, and smooth scrolling makes things objectively easier to follow, ctrl+d/u are imo at their best with some sort of smooth scrolling. Some terminal emulators provide some of these features, but none of them have all of them, which makes neovide the best neovim experience. Not by much, but it is the best, and I don't think you can just dismiss that as pointless.
Another thing, you do NOT need rust installed to get it to work. Rust is a compiled language and neovide is statically linked. It's just a single executable or package in your distro repos.
Edit: btw smooth scrolling works only with multigrid enabled. The documentation for smooth scrolling is litterally two sentences, one of them describes how to get it to work. You cannot honestly tell me you couldn't be bothered to read that before producing a hitpiece.
yeah, true that.
0:38 > "Neovide is a GUI _version of_ neovim"
> _"you fundamentally misunderstand .... Neovide is NOT an alternate version of neovim, it is a gui FOR neovim. It's just a GUI, it attaches to the neovim already installed on your computer."_
awesome. yeah, terminals are fiddly. i have tried mintty, wezterm, alacritty, conemu... all of these come with their own challenges to running TUIs.
> _"It's like a terminal emulator purpose made for neovim. ... terminal emulators and multiplexers can be fiddly in that regard, ... Some terminal emulators provide some of these features, but none of them have all of them, which makes neovide the best neovim experience. "_
[features like:] themes, powerline symbols and other font icons display, their offsets, popup-frames rounded corners, smooth scrolling
Well, there's thousands of distros as well and I don't get the point of them anyway. There all Linux, so what's the point?
Was about to say the same. 🙏
You need the check the non identical ones like Arch, Debian, NixOS, Gentoo, KissLinux , Bedrock etc
If you compare derevatives then there's generally no point
Exactly. Choice is the point.
Ligatures are built into the font. Editors, terminals etc. that are ligature-aware will display those ligatures properly.
2:39
Just enable transparency in Neovide
There isn't any theming issues
There is a note. Note: multigrid must be enabled for this to work. (smooth scrolling and blurred windows). Multigrid is disabled by default, so smooth scrolling is disabled too.
Mate, I agree with you of course, but let me give you a real solid reason you didn't consider: Complex KeyMappings!! This is true for any gui frontend btw.
In neovide you can map key combos that are very hard/hacky or just not possible with regular terminals, for ex , , etc. It works like a charm
This reason alone made me switch to neovide
For longer coding sessions neovide is really good because it's smoother
Would you like to specify? What exactly does smoother mean here? 🙏
@@ArniesTech scrolling and the cursor movement is much smoother.
Font rendering is also smooth I also like the vsync
I don't get why vim exists when u have emacs. Emacs has a programming language in it, so u can just tell emacs to do whatever vim does.
Unfortunately vim is the default editor on cl and the man pages use vim shortcuts.
Emacs is bigger and has more bells and whistles out of the box, and most people does not need it.
But neovim has a lot of bells and whistles as well. Neovim these days the "challenger" of Emacs.
Don't get me wrong I love Emacs and would fight anyone who says it's not good.
@@attilasedon9593 yeh emacs probably the "heavyweight" of the 70's i forgot.
@@attilasedon9593 That's a false dichotomy. Emacs is a programmable text editor. Neovim is a text editor with an extension language. It's a completely different mindset.
The main thing about Neovide is that it is just a nice looking, smooth and GPU accelerated Neovim-dedicated terminal emulator. If you use Alacritty, Kitty or Wezterm it doesn't stand out that much in terms of smoothness. If you were to compare it with Gnome Terminal or any other DE standard terminal (or Windows Terminal as people mention in the comments), the difference in user experience is really significant. And I guess a lot of users come from there.
I tried to use it, but it in i3 (at least for me) it has problems with drawing the Neovim TUI in the right size - I have to resize the window in order to make it redraw everything correctly, which kind of defeats the purpose of using a tiling WM + Kitty is very close in terms of smoothness, so... I just went back to good old terminal. And in the end only thing I don't have in Kitty is the fancy cursor animations.
But the fancy animations are not only on the cursor ? I like the smooth scrolling animation, the rotate animation, windows split animation, windows resize animation
1:08 GUI is just user friendly, that's why DOS evolved to windows. It's easier.
View image in markdown file is really needed, but not available.
I like having a dedicated app, since so much of my time is spent editing text. (Same reason I use nativefier on some websites)
I do have to restart it occasionally, because i run into rough spots with my lspconfig when I've opened up too many different projects in one neovim instance
That's a good point
The smoothness is *really* nice. And for me a slightly animated cursor is honestly a feedback change that feels like going from a squishy laptop keyboard to a mechanical keyboard. The only thing is I wish I had the option to ctrl+z back into a terminal and fg to resume. If it had a basic terminal emulator seamlessly integrated I think I'd switch to it as my default IDE but for now as an external editor for game engines it's fantastic. I just wish I could use it without ToggleTerm, but I am starting to get used to doing that so i may well be a full convert soon. Smooth scrolling also makes a huge difference when you're staring at and jumping around code for hours.
Try using some nvim configs that have easy access to terminals
I use astronvim and I can easily toggle a terminal with a couple shortcut keys
The cursor is cool, but if they had real time markdown rendering at least 10% of neovim users are going to switch to it
Neovide seems to exist mostly because “why not”.
Emacs GUI is nice because it’s a super configurable editor with the benefits of being graphical (non-monospaced fonts, variable line height, in-line LaTeX and image rendering, etc.), but evil mode (vim-keys) makes emacs basically a gui vim anyways.
The only advantage to a proper gui neovim right now would be using lua (better config language imo) instead of elisp
Neovim in the terminal, for me, had font issues
Neovide fixes all of that for me
And yes, i _have_ installed the entirety of nerd fonts. It fixed some fonts in neovim. But not all of it
I don't know why does this channel exist
Lol no offense. Nice video anyways
I mean, it's just fun. I'm assuming that's why people like it. One person's fun is another persons annoyance I guess.
what bar is that ?
looks so clean
I loved neovide but I agree that it's missing a UI menu to setup some UI things that only affect neovide. Seems silly adding neovide settings to my main nvim file.
My theory is, it's an editor inside a terminal window for people that don't have set up a terminal environment (which of course you have if you're on linux, but on Windows, it takes work to set up.
What bugs me more is the IDE in the name, because they do nothing to offer any addons that make this an IDE. You still have to do all the neovim customization to get IDE features.
The cursor jumping is the whole project, there's no explanation why they would have a dozen screenshots with different cursor effects on their home page.
It's literally a blazingly slow neovim lol
It feels like you're saying: "I heard of a company which makes tractors. They say those thing are pretty strong and have big tires with a lot of grip. But they are also really slow and expensive. I'm not sure why I would need such a thing because I have a car. I don't get it."
Some people just prioritize other features as you.
Besides that, great video :)
Neovide: I get it, because correct animations are pleasant to watch and they increase productivity in subtle ways when your eyes follow focus point.
What's interesting is w3m "supports" images properly in xterm (using dirty hacks and black magic)
VS code can be configured both in GUI and text file file, which makes it super cool.
Maybe it's just pet project for fun?
You don't get it, because you already have a very well setup terminal, with nvim inside. For those who don't need a complexity of Alacritty - Neovide works very well.
I use nano, and you can get line numbering and wrapping and all that stuff, I've used vim and etc, but just pressing Ctrl x and enter is easier than writing wq! or however it's done.
You should do a video on just writing straight from terminal
cat >> EOF >filename and you just type until you're done and then type EOF and it'll make the file. Something like that anyways, and I'm sure there's an easier way from cli but that always works for me.
Love your vids man, keep it up.
you can just ZZ ZQ or smth(also can change binds) and make same effect as ctrl+x in nano lol
I use nano also and I agree with you on that. I have been playing around with Micro (nano clone) but I seam to use nano all the time... Lol Other than that is is Sublime-Text... 🙂
LLAP 🖖
@@Bruces-Eclectic-World I used sublime text for years, and nano when I had to edit a file in a terminal, then I tried micro but it turns me off that it's not working as expected in many ways. So now I'm using helix, it's more intuitive than vim and is useable out of the box, great features that would require many plugins in vim, also great default settings! Try it out, it's the easiest modal editor I tried, after going through the tutor I'm already productive with it in one day :)
One of The biggest issues with it is getting the fonts to work properly
You even play one on tv? 10:45
What do you mean?
May sound very lame to some but Neovide’s cool animations made me switch to neovim from Vscode few months back. Also Neovide has better color support than Mac terminal and I iTerm2 hogs memory. Tmux + Terminal + Neovide works for me very well.
it does sound lame
It's like these devs were going: "Hey, you know how everybody hates that Neovim is not bloated? No? Well too bad because we are gonna bloat it anyway".
They completely missed the point of Vim and the bajillion macros that it offers which is to minimize the time you have to spend fiddling around with a mouse and in between keystrokes. Even going so far as to use the Esc or Arrow keys is too much for some Vim users and they expect people to essentially give up everything that is good in Vim for the sake of mouse support which you shouldn't use in Vim either way. Like, uhm... okay? I guess?
Just started using neovide. For me the selling point was the startup time. The only other "terminal" which starts that fast is `st` I wanted to have the same experience on windows (sadly it's still slow there, but thats probably due to company security software n stuff). Anyhow yeah, neovide gives you the cursor, and while typing it's just smoother than when you type in the terminal, it's just more pleasant for the eye and IMO thats enough for people to use it, and also a perfectly valid reason to prefer neovide over a raw terminal.
Convert to the Church of Emacs #TheChurchOfEmacs
Guy going "I don't understand, but I have opinions!" for 12 minutes straight.
the point of a gui for neovim is that you can open neovide from your gui file manager instead of having to open a terminal window and cd into the directory
most distros provide a desktop entry for neovim, so you can open it from your gui file manager. (I set neovim as the default file opener lol)
This is kinda annoying to watch. I do not use neovide, I have never even tried it. I have 0 problems it existing or people using it. Some of the features you are "demanding", like images and bigger text on heading elements, are not something the underlying nvim supports. Emacs does, btw.
Before I changed from vim to neovim I used gvim (gtk+) with every menu and toolbar removed/hidden. So it looked like a terminal window, just lots more colors.
That actually hindered my transtition from vim to neovim, as I didn't find UI I was happy with, and I didn't know terminals had evolved to have 24-bit color support. I finally found some gtk UI I could live with, it has menus and toolbars but I could configure it to not show them.
Since then I've moved to terminal UI, since 24-bit colors is enough for me. But there might be something in the future that makes me switch to some other UI, and it will probably not be menus and buttons. Smooth scrolling might be such a feature for me.
I never use the word demand. I don't understand why someone can't criticize something anymore in this world why I have to like everything.
@@TheLinuxCast I put the word "demand" in quotes, because I know you didn't really think you demanded it, but "demanded" it. Kinda bad communication from my part, sorry for that.
You are free to criticize anything and you don't need to like everything. But I reserve the same rights; I can criticize anything, including your video, and I don't need to like it.
u miss that dedicated gui frontend support more meta key
Hey Matt. Random question. What size monitor do you use or would you recommend ? Your screen always looks nice and well adjusted size wise. I've been pulling my hair out trying to find one I like. I'm not a gamer. Just returned a 32 inch 4k and waiting on a 27 inch 2k in its place. I've spent way too much time looking at options. Hope the 27 works. Really enjoyed the i3 speed run the other day. Hope you do some other WMs in that format. Cheers
I have two. One 32" 1080p and one 27" 1080p. The 32" is a curved display from Sceptre, the other is an HP. They're fine, nothing special, but do the job.
@@TheLinuxCast thanks. Thats helpful. Keep cranking out the great content.
So I was looking at the website and I went to the configuration section I saw an option for font scaling so I think it may have some kind of font scaling. The configuration examples are in vim script so just be aware of that. The option was like: let g:neovide_scale_factor = 1.0.
Awesome videos, keep up the great work! I LOVE that Tokyo Night Polybar theme. Is it possible to find that in your dotfiles? I've looked before and maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place but I can't find it.
The link is in my video description. It's a GitLab link. And yes this theme will be one of the ones for i3.
I use it for the cool animations
Nice video and several valid points, though I gotta say that animated cursor in Neovide is just too cool to ignore. After a while, the long trailing tail gets annoying while jumping around, but the smooth gliding animation when one types in insert-mode is really nice to have.
P.s. Actually an die-hard Emacs user, but I keep myself up-to-date with neovim/vim news just to see how it's going on the other side.
Smoothed typing animation ist the first thing I disable if I have to work in Windows with a Office program. I just can't stand it and hate it so much, that I'm wiling to enter the registry to get rid of it!
i feel the same, like you said, vim, emacs, gui text editors mark down editors etc they have different purposes. i personally use vim on terminal and i use sublime or geany for a gui text editor. and i use obsidian for mark down editing. a vim gui frontend is kinda meaningless for me, too. because there is only two different scenario that i can imagine. 1- you make a vim gui frontend and it will be the same as terminal one, and what's the purpose, you can just use in terminal then. 2- you make a vim gui frontend and you give features and advantages of being a gui app, but then it will become a gui text editor, it won't be vim anymore, so there is no purpose for it either as far as i can see. the only explanation that kinda make sense to me is if you use the vim gui frontend app on windows (like some people mentioned in other comments) because windows is not terminal oriented as linux (if you are not a developer or someone who works with what lies beneath the surface of windows system at least)
The weekly podcast: I do not get why this does not exist.
Sorry to come off in an insulting way, I had to get the pun in there, but seriously speaking, what's the news with the weekly podcast?
Will be back on Friday.
@@TheLinuxCast amazing thanks, looking forward to it
That cursor is cursed lol, I hate everything about that
Amazing work! i didn't even know Neovide exists. I'd like to see more videos on Neovim.
It’s a cool project. Id imagine that whatever new APIs for the gui the nvim decides to implement are what makes or breaks the project.
If you tale a look at what eMacs can do thanks to it being a gui the possibilities are endless
As of now we don’t even hace the ability to use different font sizes on the GUI. That’s how immature this side of the fence is
Hey Matt, great video as usual. After hearing you say that you wanted a markdown preview in Neovide, it got me wondering if
you have ever tried the vim-instant-markdown plugin for Vim/Neovim. I use it, and I really like it a lot. It launches a browser
window automatically when you start editing a markdown document in vim. It's really nice to get an instant preview of what your
markdown actually looks like as you are editing it. Anyway, you might want to give it a try if you haven't already. It's been a game changer for me. Peace out and Happy Holidays.
I use some markdown plugin, but I'm not sure which one.
No No No!!! You play one on UTube... 🤣
But, you are on my TV... Hahahahaha
LLAP 🖖
I love how I get the notification after I've already seen the video. Weird.
Nano Squad - please stand up 💪😎
I use nano, vs code, vim, and emacs.... So not sure what I fit into. 🤣 Just whatever I fancy at the moment.
Lots of Linux youtubers out there as well. They all basically talk about the same thing. I don't know why they do. Even so I either subscribe or I don't. That doesn't mean that I question why they bother to do it. I just appreciate that there is variety. Some of which will not make sense to me. But it does to others. Clickbait title aside. I think neovide is great to have.
I don't understand why I get so much crap for the so called click bait. First off, there are much worse examples on every other channel. Second, if you want to get any views on this platform, you titles have to be creative and grab attention. I.e. Click bait.
As for Neovide, there's nothing wrong with it, other than it's not something I understand. Which is what I said in the video. I don't get it. If you do, great for you.
That's for Windows user
Emacs ls just better vim Matt
#SuckItEmacs should be on a tshirt.
@@TheLinuxCast You are so rude!
@@MrCradleman I know. I'm so mean to the emacs guys. I'm a bit sorry.
@@TheLinuxCast Resistance is futile! Why you are still fighting with Emacs? You must accept it)))))
Just feels good to type on it.
I totally agree Vim/NeoVim in Terminal, or go to vscode/gui based text editor for your mouse and mouse-button mashing
How about this.. Or use Neovide? That is what makes linux, and open-source software in general great. Do what you want, how you want. You can be grump all you want that people use a tool in a way different than how you want it to be used. At the end of the day, no one cares, nor should they have to.
As a bunch of people have mentioned, smooth cursor, even when just typing is a lot less fatiguing. Also you can't make terminal truly full screen, because terminal emulators cannot display fractional number of lines/columns. Open nvim in terminal and see ugly borders. Gui is just straight superior for most use cases, the exception would be on server, and when you open close hundreds of instances of nvim a day.
You need to run it with a certain flag to enable the rest of the features.
I find it a bit funny that you have to run it from the terminal.
looks like Emacs with evil mode is the better vi graphical shell🤣
This isn't an openSUSE video
true
It's probably more targeted towards Windows users as the terminals on Windows aren't as feature-packed or performant as the terminals on *nix systems, in my experience.
Also, #EmacsMasterRace
Doom Emacs though ❤
My biggest problem is that byobu+neovim is overpowered. And I'll preach it till the day I day. And because terminals are so versatile (aka you couldn't literally do anything in it). Using a non terminal frontend for a terminal application is basically shooting yourself in the foot because now you've limited yourself.
till the day I day 🤣
Neovide is basically a terminal emulator window with a fancy cursor. Even good old Gvim provided more functionality. That's the problem with Neovim GUI wrappers: Those basically only exist because it is easy to implement Neovim in other tools.
... and ligatures are neither a terminal feature nor a GUI feature but a font feature. 😊
Uninstalled it 5 seconds after installing it.
Personally, I don't get why neovim exists. It's not like Lua is a good programming language that would really justify this. It's not like it's any easier to use for a newbie than JavaScript is. So why then would they do it. My thought, we need an embedded programming language that's even more newb friendly and can be used for super simple and slightly complex configurations. I think I'll add that to my long list of project ideas.
guis are good for windows users specifically. cmd sucks
I agree Matt Why NANO is the best LOL GVM.
Cool video and vind man! +1 sub!
Try enabling multigrid. --multigrid
Well, Neovide provides some Animation, and man, they look gorgeous. And while it's only optics, I REALLY like it. Feels so smooth!
However, I'm not really digging it either. I usually use vim in a terminal, very often over ssh. Therefore it is at least inconvenient for me to use .
Wait, you played idiot in TV? :O
nvim avg load
real 0m1.291s
emacs avg load
real 0m0.942s
Average load time for vanilla emacs beats nvim every time, and emacs vanilla is much more powerful than vanilla nvim. If you use one of the many frameworks available like Doom or spartan you can increase power and efficiency with little to no increase in load time. Not true with nvim. nvim with the Spacevim config loads in 2.79, whereas emacs with Spartan with all packages including lsp, org-mode, evil, and about 15 others loads in 1.18. But yeah, nvims got animated cursors...yay.
1:57 It should take your neovim color scheme, for background you can add this to your neovim config:
if vim.g.neovide then
vim.api.nvim_set_hl(0, 'Normal', {bg='#2b3339'})
vim.g.neovide_transparency = 0.8
end
5:07 You haven't enabled smooth scrolling, run neovide with --multigrid flag
is ur polybar config in ur repos? looks really good
Yep. Link in the description
Can't remember if I've bored you with this before, so perhaps forgive me. I started off with 'vi' in the 90s because I had a freelance gig at a client running Un*x boxes and that's all there was. It was *such* a pain to learn that I promised myself that I never go through that pain again, and now use 'gvim' for all programming work on any platform.
Hah, just saw your later comment about a settings panel. Even in gvim, which I have come to know, configure, and love, I still have to hack a .vimrc file. A competent settings panel would be amazing!
Related: I'd love to see what you have in your .vimrc one day :)