 I am a Neo Vim user. I prefer to do most of my writing inside of Neo Vim and I've been that way now for several months and I've used Neo Vim or Vim before that for quite a long time. I think Vim is fantastic and I proclaim its greatness from on high. I think it's just the best text editor there is and I will fight you Emacs traders forever and argue that and debate it forever. But that's really beside the point because today I want to talk about something a little bit different and that is called Neo Vide. Now Neo Vide is a GUI version of Neo Vim. If that sounds weird to you. It is because it's weird. Now it's been around for quite a while and there are other graphical front ends for Vim and Neo Vim out there. And they all have the same problem that I have with Neo Vide and that problem is that I don't get it. I don't understand the purpose. Now the reason why is because listen there is a reason why people prefer GUIs right. GUIs definitely do provide some strategic and efficient benefits over a terminal interface in a lot of cases. So it offers you the ability to have better font rendering and it gives you the opportunity to have menu systems and buttons and things that you can click on and all this stuff right. There are benefits to using a GUI. There are benefits to using a terminal. What I don't understand is why you take a terminal and shove it inside of a GUI but not give the benefits of a GUI. So that's what I'm going to talk about today. So let's take a look at Neo Vide. This right here is Neo Vide and if you were confused and thought Matt that's just Neo Vim in a terminal I can understand where you think that because it looks like Neo Vim in a terminal but with less theming than you'd normally see and nothing else. Like I don't know if this looks a little bit different in like a desktop environment but inside of a window manager this is what Neo Vide looks like. And like I said it looks like a terminal like if I were to open up these exact windows in a terminal so if I go to another workspace here open up a terminal and then CD into like my repo here or something and then I don't even a Lackardy and then into a Lackardy.yaml which is one of I think is one of the files that I have open. This is what regular Neo Vim looks like and it has a little bit more theming because it follows some of the colors from my terminal but other than that it kind of looks the same don't you think. I mean it looks like a terminal and that is the first thing that you notice when you use Neo Vide. Now it does proclaim that it has some features that you can't get in Neo Vim and I'm not sure that that's true but let's go through a couple of them. So first is this really weird cursor that they have and you can change this cursor to several different options. The default one looks like this. So if you click because this is very much a mouse based interactive UI sometimes if you click on something you can see this it's not even doing it really well. Oh you kind of saw there it was really really fast like if you you see how kind of like animates it's really hard to to see because it moves so fast and it's kind of it feels kind of glitchy oh it looks even better this way if you just drag in in visual mode and if you switch over here see how kind of jumped and stuff yeah that's that's a cursor that is it's as far as I can tell that's it's selling feature that's the thing that grabs people's attention like oh that cursor is really cool and if we look at their github page or their documentation we can see that there are several other cursors that you can enable so there's one called rail gun which apparently shoots back and forth even faster than the one that I just showed you there's torpedo which again looks even faster one called pixel dust which looks like this which I don't it's I think that what's differing here is the trailing like dust after it which you can't really see probably on camera at all it's very very subtle that part and then there's this one here which apparently like flashes when you click it's a little weird and like there's there's several of them and we go through all of them if you wanted to but you know there's several little cursors that you can change and that's its selling feature supposedly it also has ligatures which is a terminal feature not a text editor feature as far as I'm aware ligatures come with specific terminals like kitty has ligature support I believe so that would be then supported terminal wide whatever application you had would use ligatures I'm assuming that's the way it works I've never used them before but this has ligatures built in so it's basically taking a terminal feature and putting inside of them which is I suppose makes sense because you're not using a terminal even though it looks like one right another feature is they have the animated cursor which we just talked about and then they have smooth scrolling which I mean okay I mean if I were into if I go here I mean my scrolling looks pretty good too and I mean okay I mean I don't I don't think that's much of a benefit but maybe some people prefer to use their mouse in Vim I don't really understand why but let me stop there for a second like I would understand wanting to use your mouse inside of a GUI version of them if it had other features right so like I said there are benefits that you get to using a GUI and one of them is a big one and I thought this was going to be the killer feature for me because I thought I was going to be able to go use a version of them outside of a terminal that had proper font rendering so what I mean by that is like if I were to have a heading inside of a markdown file and it's like a h1 heading it would actually change size to the h1 heading size right instead of in the traditional Vim fashion because it's in a terminal and all text is the same size in the terminal you know it just stays the same size it just maybe highlights it or something and that was the feature that I was really hoping something like this would have but it doesn't it just it doesn't and that's disappointing to me but also confusing because what was the purpose of making a GUI version of NeoVim if you're not going to provide a feature that GUI's normally have now it's possible that I'm just not understanding the purpose of this application maybe it's not really supposed to be a quote-unquote GUI version of them maybe it's just supposed to be a standalone terminal that does nothing else other than NeoVim maybe that's what it's supposed to do I don't know but the features that it proclaims on their website aren't really all that interesting to me so they have this animated windows thing here that looks kind of cool but I don't know how it works I've never been able to actually get that to work I've been working on I've been playing around with this for like I said a few hours and I can't get that to work and there's no instructions here as far as I can tell on how to actually use this the same thing with this blurred float floating window I'm not sure what you'd use that for but apparently it's there maybe it's for like oh it looks like it's they use it as a terminal pop-up which could be cool and then they have emoji support not picture support but emoji support like if you're again if you're in a GUI theoretically you could support images like actual pictures and photos and like inside of a markdown file again but no that's not supported here just emojis again I mean I may be wrong but if I were to actually like going to insert mode here I'm gonna kill my lacquer to fill config so I can't save this but if I were to insert a emoji yeah I have that's regular NeoVim it has emoji support I don't know because again NeoVim's not it's not divorced from the terminal if your terminal has emoji support NeoVim has emoji support that's the way it works as far as I'm aware so that again not a standout feature because that works not obviously the emoji doesn't show up like the color of emoji so that's going to be different so if you wanted to color emoji then I suppose that's you know a benefit but again I don't know because it this whole thing I just don't get it but the thing is is that this is not a NeoVide problem I've tried multiple quote unquote GUI front-ends for Vim and NeoVim I tried GVM today I've tried several other ones I can't even remember what their names were I've tried like five or six of them and they all have this exact same problem in that they are proclaim themselves to be a GUI front-end for Vim or NeoVim but they don't offer any of the options that a GUI would offer you GVM is actually the only one that comes with GUI options as this is this right here is GVM and as you can see this one actually has some things that you'd expect out of a GUI so there are buttons here that you can press it does things like switch between buffers through a menu system you can choose different views and different windows and you know how does you can split using actual like the menu system if you wanted to you could choose your syntax highlighting and stuff like that all from a menu system this is what a GUI is supposed to give you and that's cool it doesn't have the cool font rendering features that I was hoping for but at least this here if you wanted a GUI front-end for Vim this gives it to you at least somewhat way better than this does which is just a terminal with NeoVim in it with a fancy cursor as far as I can tell and again like I said at the end of the day I just don't get it like I said there has to be something that I'm missing something you know maybe there are some hidden documents that I didn't see in their documentation maybe there is some features here that I just don't understand or didn't get or missed or something that's possible but as it is right now I just I don't get it like here's another thing like when you if you have a GUI and you want to configure it usually you'd expect like a settings panel or something like a preferences panel like with you if you have a KDE application it has a settings panel which has a ton of settings in it right or if you want to change the settings in like Firefox or OBS or something that has a settings panel NeoVide is configured in a configuration file it's actually configured in your NeoVim configuration file as far as I can tell but whether that's true or not I don't actually know all I know is it is configured inside of a configuration file which again defeats the purpose of having a GUI front-end for NeoVim because if you are the type of person who would want that you'd probably also want to be able to configure it inside of a GUI which you can't seem to do I don't get it I don't understand and like I said it's 100% possible that this just blew over the top of my head and I missed something completely obvious you know I am an idiot I even play one on TV but as it is right now and with the time that I've spent with it and the time going through the documentation I don't get it it doesn't mean that it's not okay to exist like it's fine if you want to use this it's okay it's like a dedicated like NeoVim tool that just does NeoVim it sounds okay to me but like I said I don't know why what benefits it would give me or anybody who's just uses NeoVim just use NeoVim like NeoVim offers all of these functionalities that it's supposed to offer and it's also just NeoVim you're not you're not introducing anything else because this is written in Rust so you have to have the Rust dependencies and all that stuff in order to actually get this thing to work and that adds an extra like a layer in between you and NeoVim which is not necessary seeing so it doesn't really offer you anything other than a fancy cursor as far as I can tell so that is it for this video if you know the reason why NeoVide actually exists and if there's something really good for it and then I just missed it leave those in the comment section below I'd love to 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