 So, my text editor of choice in the last few months has been Doom Emacs, which is a distribution of Emacs that uses the Evil keybindings, the Vim keybindings, and it's really fantastic. Doom Emacs comes with a lot of sensible defaults, a lot of plug-ins already installed for you, some turned on, some not turned on, but it's really easy to enable or disable the plug-ins you want to use or don't want to use with Doom Emacs. Doom Emacs is fantastic. I've done a lot of videos on it. But some of the Vim fanboys have been a little upset at me because I moved from Vim over to Doom Emacs. They're like, hey, you didn't have to go to Doom Emacs. Vim has distributions set up just like Doom Emacs. You could have checked out a distribution of Vim, such as Space Vim. And they're right. I should check out Space Vim, so today I'm going to do a quick first look and first impression of Space Vim. I don't know anything about this particular project other than it's a distribution of Vim. Again, it's going to have some plug-ins. It's going to look really nice out of the box. You shouldn't have to do much with it. That's kind of the point of these distributions of Vim and the distributions of Emacs, such as Space Max and Doom Emacs, is that it's already set up for you. You shouldn't have to spend hours and hours or in some cases weeks or months configuring the thing. It should be set up for you, ready to go out of the box. It's supposed to be really good, especially for the new user. If you're new to Vim or you're new to Emacs, getting one of these pre-built distributions is really a godsend because as a new user, you're not going to have any idea how to write that config and set up everything you want to set up. So something like Space Vim is great for the new user because it gives you some ideas of what the editor can be. So let me jump right into this thing. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go into their documentation. And I will say, first impression, their website and their documentation looks good. If I go to their quick start guide, I believe this is where I will find the installation instructions. Yeah, here's the install for Linux and Mac OS and there is an installation guide for Windows. I'm going to, of course, use the Linux install guide and it looks like we install it simply with the curl command. So we pull down this bash script with curl and then, of course, run it. Now this can be dangerous. It's not something you typically want to do unless you really trust somebody. You don't want to just go curl some script onto your system and then run it in your shell. But of course, Space Vim is a rather large project. I trust them with this. So what I need to do is pull up a terminal and let me zoom in here so you guys can see this. And I'm going to go ahead and paste that curl command. And it should just be a one command install. Okay. This was really nice. So we got a little bit of what it was doing and installed Space Vim for Vim and installed Space Vim for Neo Vim because I'm actually a Neo Vim user. My Vim is actually Neo Vim. It detected that. So I guess any time I launch either Vim or Neo Vim, I'm going to launch Space Vim. That's interesting. Checked for some power line fonts, mainly deja vu sans mono and droid sans mono and also Hibuntu mono all for power line. So let's get started with this thing. So if it's installed, let me Vim space dot bash RC. Let's open my bash RC and Space Vim here. And I will say the colors are not bad. They're using the gruff box colors, not my favorite color scheme, but it is a popular color scheme. A lot of people like using it. I will say it's got the nice power line effects and everything. I was actually a little surprised. I didn't get a proper home page or a greeter page like you get in something like Space Max or Doomy Max. Maybe the problem was I specified a file though. So if I launch Vim with no other arguments and then I get the home page, the greeter page and you get something written in some ASCII art here. I'm not exactly sure what that's supposed to be. It says hi there. Okay, I see. And it's kind of tough to read that particular ASCII art. And then we have our most recent documents we've opened in Vim. So that's kind of neat. We have a file viewer over here. This is as a snare tree, no, according to the description down here at the bottom in the status line, this is the Vim Filer plugin. I've never actually used that plugin. I've never actually heard of that plugin. That's interesting. So that would be interesting to know about by the way, this plugin here that I guess the start page here is Startify. That's another Vim plugin that I have never heard of. So Space Vim already, I can tell you, is going to be interesting for me because it's going to introduce me to some Vim plugins that I did not previously know about. And in the Startify page, you see, we have our recent files that we opened up in Vim. Off camera, I did open up the Space Vim init file. I'm going to show you that here in a minute. I was a little worried. When I ran that curl script, I wasn't sure what it was going to do to my VMRC and my NeoVim init file as well. And you see config, invim, underscore, backup, init.vm. It creates a backup of your NeoVim config. So don't worry, it won't overwrite anything. I mean, it will overwrite everything, but it creates a backup. You're going to have a VMRC underscore backup. And I think you're going to have invim underscore back directory as well. So all of your stuff is backed up. So if I click zero on the keyboard, so you see I have E for empty buffer and then zero through 11. If I hit zero, I can get bash RC, I'm assuming. And that is, in fact, what happens here. And again, we've got the default colors, the gruff box colors. And I would assume that if I hit space on the keyboard, similar to what you do in Doomy Max, space, and then, all right, we get some hints as far as some of the other commands that we can do. So if I do space and then A for applications, that would give me probably another menu or space and then B for buffers, well, let's do that. So I've already hit space, let's do B for buffers. And then it gives me the next list of commands for buffers. Buffer, previous buffer, I could probably kill a buffer or delete a buffer. Yeah, I see that in the list as well. Right now I only have the bash RC up so I really can't do much with the buffers. But let me open up another program here or another document to view here. So if I do, how about I just do a colon VS for vertical split. And let me open up my ZSH RC file. So we have two different buffers going on. Actually, I'd have a third buffer because Vimfiler I would assume would also be a buffer as well. So now let me do space B for buffer. And then if I do in for next buffer, right, let's see the bash RC goes to the next buffer, which is ZSH RC. So if I do space B and again, space B and again, okay, well, there's only two buffers to work with. So there's not much to do here. Anyway, and we also have tabs at the top. I just noticed that by default, space Vim does have tabs enabled. That's pretty cool. Although I'm not really sure I need the tabs if I'm going to use a split. I probably wouldn't have opened the split the way I did had I known that it was going to do this. But let me just go ahead and close that split. Actually, let me see if the standard Vim key bindings work by do control W C for close or window close. That works as well. Let me actually open up the space Vim a net file. So if I do colon to get back into command mode, I'm going to do colon E, we're going to edit a file. The net file for space Vim is in your home directory at dot space Vm dot D because it's a hidden directory. So dot space Vm dot D and then a net dot Toml. And if I hit enter, and this is the default a net dot Toml. And there's not much to it, you know, I expect to this thing to just be full of all kinds of crap because you know, space Vim, you know, it's got so much going on, but there's really not much to it. The color scheme by default is grub box. There are some other color schemes. If I get back into command mode and do color scheme, and then just tab to see the available color schemes, we have space Vim, which is just the default theme, which is grub box. We have blue, dark blue default, delik desert Elf Ford or however the hell you pronounce that industry Pablo Peach Puff. These are all the standard default kind of Vim color schemes. So they're nothing special. But grub box, it looks like it's the one they want to go with. It's kind of popular. I'm surprised I didn't see solarized in the list. That's another really popular one had solarized dark men in the list. I'd switch to that because I'd prefer that. I didn't see other popular color schemes like Dracula also wasn't in the list, but it's very easy to change the color scheme. All you got to do is change the color scheme from grub box over to one of the available color schemes like delik or desert or desert or whatever. You have status line separators equals the arrows. I guess you could change that to other values as well. Other than that, you have some other stuff here, layers, autocomplete. I guess this has something to do with the autocompletion feature within Space Vim. Other than that, if you want to figure out how to configure it, I guess we need to get into the documentation. So if I go to the documentation tab here and interface elements color schemes, we just talked about that fonts. Can you change the fonts? Vim is a terminal application. So yeah, you could add this line GUI font equals source code pro is what their example is. That's interesting. So if I go here and let me just add a new line here and we've got that line commented out. If I write that, that's a GUI font though. It's not a terminal font. I have source code pro on the system though. You know what? Let me change this. Let me see if it actually works and I'll change it to H 15 here because I really want to know if it changes. This should be pretty obvious if the font all of a sudden becomes bigger. But if I do a colon WQ for write and quit and then get back into Vim, yeah, it's still the same, right? Or did it change? It does look like it changed, didn't it? Let me get the bash RC open or is that the same font as before? I think it is the same size. It's hard to tell, isn't it? Let me do a colon and then let me get back to this command here. Let's go ahead and edit this. Let me edit it to a really big font size. So I thought 15 would be obvious, but I guess it's not. Let's see if 18 is obvious. That's obviously that didn't change. So I don't think that that made any difference here, which I didn't think it would because why would it? For one thing, I misspelled the font too. All right, now that I've spelled it correctly, let's try it. I still didn't change it. So I don't think this line actually does anything because GUI font, you know, again, that's for GVIM, right? That's for the GUI version of VIM GVIM VIM in our terminal. There's really no way to do anything with the fonts because VIM by default does not handle fonts, right? The fonts are entirely handled by the terminal emulator that you're running VIM in. So I wouldn't think that line would work unless you know what? Let me write and quit out of that. I didn't think about this. GVIM. GVIM does work, although I don't think Sauce Code Pro, the GUI font I said, I don't think it's actually working because that's not Sauce Code Pro. So let me get back into, well, actually, I guess I could just do this in GVIM itself. Let me, where is the space VIM init.toml? I'm just going to delete this line. For now, I'll just use whatever default font they have here, right? And quit that. And I'm going to relaunch GVIM. Yeah, I like that. And that is actually more like Doomy Max and Space Max in that it is an actual GUI program. Yeah, and that's probably the way I would use Space VIM. Now that I know that you can use it as either VIM, Neo VIM, or GVIM, I think it makes more sense to use it in the graphical form GVIM because that really could give you access to things you normally would never have in terminal-based VIM. For example, because GVIM is a graphical application, it could display images. If you needed to display images, emojis, you could also use plugins that do interesting graphical stuff. For example, many people love having a mini-map on the side of the screen. You guys have seen the mini-map that editors like Sublime Text, for example, come with or even some of the plaintext editors in Linux, such as Katie's Kate, you know, or is it K-Write? One of them has a mini-map. And you can't really do that in terminal-based VIM because it has to use the exact font that the terminal emulator is using, the exact font phase, the exact font size. And all it can do, I guess, to kind of mimic a mini-map is display maybe like Braille Dots or something, but it really doesn't look good. And it really doesn't give you any idea of where you're at in this very lengthy document where GVIM, you could actually install a mini-map plugin. And it would actually look right. It would look like any other mini-map plugin in a GUI text editor like Sublime or whatever. So yeah, this is interesting. One thing I don't like, though, is I really don't like that the VIM filer is not showing me my hidden files and directories. I wonder if there's a way to toggle that on and off. I'm actually looking through the SpaceMax documentation at the moment, and I cannot find a way to do that. If I just do a search here, I'm actually in Firefox. If I do a search for hidden, because I'm assuming that somewhere on this page it would mention hidden files or directories. It does not. It mentions the key binding, though, to toggle the VIM filer on and off F3, or you could use SpaceFT. Okay. Well, that's interesting. At least I know the key binding to toggle it on and off. So for me, I would just use SpaceFT. SpaceFT. All right. SpaceFT. Okay. That works. So what otherwise has been fantastic documentation? I will say the SpaceVim guys need to document how I get hidden files and directories in the VIM filer. Because it's almost useless if it won't show me the hidden files, because so many files that you edit on a regular basis, especially on Linux, are .files, config files. So yeah, we need to fix that. Maybe I should file a bug report with the SpaceVim guys when I'm done with the video. So let me pull up a graphical file manager since VIM filer is not really working for me at the moment, since I can't actually get into a hidden directory, because I want to get into .SpaceVim and .SpaceVim.D. I'm not sure what's going on in these directories. I know .SpaceVim.D is the one that has our init.toml, our config file, but .SpaceVim without the D, I think, is the directory that has all the plugins. Yeah. It's down here. Is it bundle? Yeah. All right. So these are VIM plugins, and it has a lot of them. Oh, I wasn't aware it was this many plugins on here. If I just do a Control-A to select everything, it looks like there's 61 items when that includes the readme. So it looks like 60 items. So 60 plugins. Let me just go through the list here, and I'll point out some of the ones that stand out to me that I recognize. Just right off the bat, I do notice that they have NerdTree here. So I could use NerdTree instead of VIM filer, which may be what I would end up doing if I can't get VIM filer to actually show me the .files. Also, I noticed in the list here, Fortran.vim. So that's a VIM plugin, I'm assuming, for people that are programming in Fortran. That is weird that they would include that. That is very strange. Looks like we also have the NerdCommander plugin. That's very popular. Tabular is a very popular plugin. VIM Airline is the power line effect going on, I'm assuming, which makes sense. I've always found VIM Airline to be a little more reliable as far as it doesn't tend to be a hassle and break as much as the standard power line package in VIM. I never could get power line to work consistently across all terminal emulators, but VIM Airline seems to take care of that. Of course, we have the VIM Airline themes because you can theme the power line to be a different color scheme if you want it. VIM Startify against the Start page. VIM Surround is a very popular plugin as well. Looking through their key bindings right now, I do notice one odd thing. I was looking for how to do splits here. Obviously, you can always do colon, split, and colon, v, split, and I do know the commands to do it with the control key. You could do control w, v for vertical, split, but I was going to see if they had any simpler key bindings or maybe key bindings that involved the space key here in space VIM, but looks like for splits, you do sv and sg, but sv is not a vertical split. sv is, I think, the horizontal split. sg is the vertical split. That makes no sense, but let's try it out. I'm interested. So if I do sv, yeah, that's a horizontal split, which is kind of cool. Now if I go back up here and I do sg, you know, that's really what I would consider a vertical split and that's actually what really is a vertical split in VIM because colon vs, of course, gets you that same effect, which is the vertical split. I know it's confusing. Some people call vertical splits, horizontal splits and horizontal splits, vertical splits because, I mean, is this really a vertical split? I would say it is because it splits two columns, you know, vertical columns, but some people would say, well, you split it, you know, so you got two things side by side in a horizontal pattern. It's kind of weird, you know, so, you know, in Emacs, this is really a horizontal split, but in VIM, it's really a vertical split. It's confusing, but I wish they would change that key binding because I think sv makes more sense for the vertical split and instead of sg. Now in Space Max and Doomy Max, you can navigate splits using key bindings that use the space key, space w for space window, space w, and then hjkl, the navigation keys, the standard VIM navigation keys. So if I do space wl, I move to the split over on the right. If I do space wj for down, I move to the split down here. If I do space wk to move up, I move back up into that split. Well, that's kind of cool. I wonder if I can close a split with space wc. Now, space wc is not bound, but I could always just use one of the standard VIM key bindings, which is control wc to close. OK, that works, control wc again to close that split. Now, one very important thing I want to take a look at because, you know, one of the really neat things that I love about Doomy Max is how easy it is to add and remove Emacs plugins, Emacs extensions. And I want to see if I can get that same kind of ease of use in something like Space Vim. How easy is it to install your own custom plugins? Because by default, the init.toml for Space Vim, I don't see like any list of plugins or anything. You know, how do I go about adding plugins? Let me review the documentation here. And there is a plugin section. It talks about updating, you know, the default plugins that come with it. But they do have this one little section here, add custom plugins. If you want to add plugins from GitHub, just add the repo name to the custom plugins section. So we need to create a custom plugin section. I'm assuming to our init.toml. Let's see if that actually works. I'm kind of curious about this myself. So I just added their example plugin, which is the Colorizer plugin. I guess that's not something that ships by default with Space Vim. So let me do a colon WQ for write and quit. Now let me relaunch gvm, if I can type correctly. And I don't know if it actually installed that Colorizer plugin or not. I guess I need to find something that has some colors. You know, I know my X resources file has some hex colors in it. So let's do our X resources file. Let me get down here to where the hex colors are. These are all commented outlines. Here are some hex colors, but they are not highlighted in any way. Let me get back into the documentation here. Update plugins colon capital S P update. OK, let's try that. So let me get back over here so you guys can see this S P update. And Colorizer is in the list here and it says updating done. So I guess it did install this this plugin. So I don't know why it didn't. Colorize my X resources colors there. But maybe it just doesn't like these kinds of hex value colors. Maybe it just does it for RGB value colors or something like that. I'm not sure what's going on, but it installed the plugin. It's just doesn't seem to be working correctly. But that's how you install the plugins. So if I go back here to the net Tom will you just create this new section custom underscore plugins and then you list your plugins under their repo equals the repo from GitHub. And I think that's where I'm going to quit with this very quick cursory look at Space Vim. This was a first look, first impression kind of video because I thought this would be really neat coming at it from a brand new user because that's kind of what Space Vim is supposed to be for. It's supposed to be for the new Vim user. These actually on their website say it's for the elementary quote elementary Vim user. So somebody that really doesn't know anything about Vim because if you don't know anything about Vim, how are you going to know how to turn Vim into a IDE? You're not going to know all the plugins you need. You know, you're not going to know about all the completion plugins and the language syntax plugins and things like the colorizer plugins and nerd tree and Vim Fowler and things like that. You're going to have to do serious research and it can be confusing to get into that stuff. If you don't know what you're doing, you know, Space Vim just takes care of all that stuff and it did kind of overwrite all my configs, my VM RC and my Neo VM RC. I mean, it backed them up. I still have them. But I'm not sure if I'm going to restore my standard Neo Vim config. I may actually just leave Space Vim on the system. I'm seriously thinking about just using this as Vim for a while. Of course, I'm going to spend most of my time in Doomy Max because Doomy Max is my preferred text editor. But any time I launch Vim, I think what I'm going to do is just launch Space Vim. It's already aliased, I think, anyway. Any time I launch Vim right now, it actually launches Space Vim. So I think that's just what I'm going to do. I'm just going to keep using this as Vim every time I open up Vim. Because I just think it's a neat project. And I'm really glad that I checked this out. A lot of you guys have been asking about this. A lot of you Vim users, especially, hey, check out Space Vim. I actually am very impressed with this project. It has a great website. The documentation is pretty fantastic. And if you go check out their GitHub, a lot of people are actually working on this. They claim it's a community driven Vim distribution. And it really is. It looks like they have dozens of active people working on the project. So definitely check it out if you are a Vim user, or if you're thinking about getting into Vim, maybe give Space Vim a try. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show, Michael Gabe, Corbinion, Mitchell Devonfran, Art5530, Akami Channel, Chuck Claudio, Nani, Dylan, George, Greg, Caleb Devils, Louis Paul Scott and Willie. They are the producers of the show. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen help support my work over on Patreon, because this channel is supported by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace. Now, how do I exit out of Vim?