 For the last year and a half. I've been an emacs user I've been a happy emacs user and I'm not really looking to go back to VIM But I do keep up to date with some of the development and the things that go on with VIM and especially with Neo VIM And one of the cool things about Neo VIM is there is a lot of graphical front-ends to Neo VIM people are writing GUI clients for Neo VIM and one of the ones that I've heard about here recently and I wanted to take a look on camera today is Neo VIM which is a graphical Neo VIM client written in Rust now Neo VIM is available for Linux Mac and Windows just like Neo VIM is available on Linux Mac and Windows You can run Neo VIM on all the operating systems the source code is hosted over on GitHub You could build it yourself for those of you that are running Arch or an Arch based system You can find Neo VIM in the Arch user repositories They also have installation instructions for those of you running Debian or a boon to based instructions here on the GitHub page Neo VIM of course is free and open-source software. It's licensed under the MIT license and their GitHub page is Really nice because instead of just having screenshots They actually have animated gifts displaying some of what Neo VIM can do and the main thing that Neo VIM provides Is these cool animation effects especially when your cursor is moving? So that is the big thing it provides the other big thing it provides is smooth scrolling now Let me switch to my desktop and let me launch Neo VIM I'm gonna launch my bash rc here in Neo VIM and the two big claims to fame with Neo VIM The neat things it provides that you know standard Neo VIM in the terminal does not provide is the cursor animation So if I'm just moving down you really can't tell when I'm making small movements, but let's say I make a big jump I'm on line 24 right now. What if I go to the first line you see the really neat animation? You can tell exactly where that cursor jumps to because it had that almost sliding effect where in standard VIM or standard Neo VIM that cursor jump is immediate and Unless you really are drawn you're not your eyes not really drawn to where that cursor is moving a lot of times Sometimes the cursor can get lost so these animations although they are for effect, right? They had a little bling to your Neo VIM. They actually do serve a purpose. Let me move down 10 lines Let me move down 10 lines again. Let me move back up Of course, I can you know click with the mouse and move my cursor and it's really neat I like it follows you around everywhere if I wanted to select some text You know when I'm selecting text the cursor just jumping around now The other big thing was the smooth scrolling and I'm scrolling with the mouse wheel right now And that is very smooth scrolling right there's no jitters no jumps. I mean, it's just smooth as butter I would almost switch to Neo VIDE from regular Neo VIM just for that smooth scrolling effect I'm not even kidding now. How do you configure Neo VIDE? Well, Neo VIDE remember is just a graphical front-end to Neo VIM itself so Neo VIDE just reads your Neo VIM config You're a knit dot VIM that should be in your home directory slash dot config slash in VIM That's the file that controls Neo VIDE as well. So let's open up my Neo VIM config So let me go ahead and I'm gonna do colon E for edit and I'm gonna go to my home directory Dot config slash in VIM and then a knit dot VIM So this is my Neo VIM config and because I had never used a graphical client for Neo VIM or VIM for that matter Because all the graphical clients for VIM such as GVIM suck really bad You know, I've always just been a terminal VIM user. So in my config I didn't have any settings for GUI clients and you have to have settings for GUI clients Otherwise, you know, this thing will not be configured in any way. For example, this is my color scheme This is basically the doom emacs color scheme the doom one color scheme that doom emacs uses I had implemented that into my terminal and into my Neo VIM config But the problem is I didn't have these lines here like GUI foreground GUI background I had C term foreground and C term background for the terminal base Neo VIM But I never bothered adding GUI colors for anything because I never planned on using a GUI front end So I had to go in here. I had to spend a little time in this config To set all my colors to match what was going on in the terminal version of Neo VIM So I needed to add that there was also some other settings You may need to add some mouse settings If you want to be able to grab text like I'm doing here with the mouse Make sure you have set mouse equals a is what I'm using for that setting Also, you need to set GUI options for your GUI font If you don't have a GUI font set Then it's just going to default to your standard system font your standard system Monospace font because most people unless you have ever used a GUI VIM or GUI Neo VIM client You've never set a GUI font because your fonts are set of course by the terminal emulator What the font is set in that so you're all going to go have to add that line there I set mine to source code pro which is an open-sourced version of source code pro and this wasn't hard I mean I had to spend I don't know ten minutes Maybe adding some of the various GUI options and the GUI color options and things to my config But now that I've got that done. I mean everything everything works fine I could actually use Neo vibe and be happy with it like I could strictly be a Neo vibe user Now there are a couple of things that do bug me a little bit with Neo vibe One of them is even though the get a page talks about it can display colored emojis again I it seems to be broken here on arco linux Maybe it's broken on all arch based systems But it doesn't matter what I set the font to even if I set my font Which right now is source code pro if I set that to joy pixels or noto color emoji or any kind of colored emoji font Then though these fonts wouldn't even display regular character text characters. All they do is display emojis I still can't get emojis to render. So I have this file here on my system Moji dot text. Let me cat it out here in the alacrity terminal alacrity doesn't handle colored emojis that well But it does display them as these little black-and-white Unicode glyphs here, which is fine that is still better than the way neo vibe hands will set because That is that same file and you know each one of these headings There's a line of emojis up under it But you know none of the emojis display not a single one and again That's displayed with source code pro which probably wouldn't display on many way, but it really doesn't matter what font I've set that to I've set it to a dozen different fonts many of them again strictly emoji fonts and it still Doesn't render emojis at all one other minor gripe It's not a gripe to me because I don't really like transparency But for those of you that like transparency and your terminal-based neo vim Transparency is great because most of your terminals allow you to set the background of the terminal to be transparent Which is really nice, but here in neo vibe. What you have to do is set the entire neo vibe window as Transparent and that's 95% transparency there or opacity there and You know it just bleeds through a little bit and I've got it set to such Such minor transparency just very minor transparency because if I set it to light the text is actually transparent Like everything in the window even the status bar is transparent So it's completely different than neo vim in the terminal which just the background itself is transparent But the bar and the text and all of that is not transparent at all And so you really can have some readability problems with windows like this that don't have you know standard Transparency they basically make the entire window transparent. So I personally wouldn't use Transparency in neo vibe since it doesn't have true transparency. It's the same reason I don't do transparency in e-max e-max is the same way if I set transparency in e-max the entire e-max window Is transparent including the text and it just causes problems with readability, but those are minor gripes for me I would be just fine with neo vibe how it is I mean it uses all of my neo vm key bindings is again It's using the neo vm config and you can see the cursor move around when I move around the splits Let me open up another vertical split and if I you know move to that split and then move to that split You know, it really does have some nice animation effects I've got to give it that and by the way the cursor effects. There are different cursor effects you have Well, here's an animated gift You have this one where you get a little trail of characters following the The cursor and that one's called the rail gun effect They've got a like a dozen different cursor effects that you can choose from Let me see if I can show you some of these so let me get back to the desktop here Let me close one of these splits here and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get into command mode I'm gonna do a colon and then let G colon neo vibe underscore cursor underscore VFX underscore mode well, that's a lot to type and then Equals and let's try the rail gun effect So that this is the rail gun and you see I've got little bubbles appearing outside the The cursor when I most that's really neat Looking back at some of the documentation some of the other cursor effects torpedo Pixie dust, let me see if I can get those to work as well So I'm just gonna get back into command mode and let's up arrow to get that last command and let's change to Torpedo and see yeah. Oh, right That's kind of like the last effect itself It's like on steroids now it moves quicker and a lot more bubbles trailing it Let me do the colon again and go back up and let's try pixie dust just trying one more Cursor effect here and let's see what that does Okay, and you get some dots some trailing dots, but they're very minor. So this is much more minimal So if you like less bloat with your animations pixie dust might be the one So that's just a very quick look at neo vibe a graphical neo vim client written and rust and I think it's cool It's got a couple of nickels, you know for those of you that want true transparency and colored emoji support They're kind of iffy right now, but for me, I don't need them I just need a working text editor and as a neo vim text editor It works a hundred percent a matter of fact it works a hundred percent and it provides a couple of things that honestly I really love I love the cursor animations visually when you're jumping in the large amounts of distance with your cursor The animations really do help and I love the smooth scrolling the smooth scrolling for me because I do a lot with the mouse wheel That would make me You know what I'm probably not going to uninstall neo vibe from my system What I think I might do is I'm gonna go ahead and leave it on my system I'm gonna go ahead and alias vim on my computer to actually just run neo vibe now before I go I need to think a few special people. I need to think the producers of this episode I'm talking about absy Dallas gay blue Mitchell Allen a commie archery charge 30 show Dave the other David Dylan Gregory Lewis Paul Scott with Steven Wesson Willie these guys they are the producers of this show They are my high-steered patrons over on patreon without these guys. You wouldn't know about neo vibe You wouldn't know about it The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well All of these names you're seeing on the screen right now each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen help support My work over on patreon because the distro tube channel is sponsored by you guys the community You want to help me out look for distro tube over on patreon? All right guys Peace We need a neo vim front-end written in a Haskell