I'm also on Mastodon, where I toot a lot about Linux and other things. Give me follow: fosstodon.org/@thelinuxcast

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.

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.

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?

Ligatures are built into the font. Editors, terminals etc. that are ligature-aware will display those ligatures properly.

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

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.

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

what bar is that ? looks so clean

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.

1:08 GUI is just user friendly, that's why DOS evolved to windows. It's easier.

2:39 Just enable transparency in Neovide There isn't any theming issues

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

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

View image in markdown file is really needed, but not available.

Amazing work! i didn't even know Neovide exists. I'd like to see more videos on Neovim.

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?

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

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.

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)

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.

One of The biggest issues with it is getting the fonts to work properly

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.

Just feels good to type on it.

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

It's literally a blazingly slow neovim lol

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.

I totally agree Vim/NeoVim in Terminal, or go to vscode/gui based text editor for your mouse and mouse-button mashing

Neovide: I get it, because correct animations are pleasant to watch and they increase productivity in subtle ways when your eyes follow focus point.

u miss that dedicated gui frontend support more meta key

I love how I get the notification after I've already seen the video. Weird.

I use nano, vs code, vim, and emacs.... So not sure what I fit into. 🤣 Just whatever I fancy at the moment.

I don't know why does this channel exist Lol no offense. Nice video anyways

You even play one on tv? 10:45 What do you mean?

I use it for the cool animations

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

is ur polybar config in ur repos? looks really good

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

You need to run it with a certain flag to enable the rest of the features.

Nano Squad - please stand up 💪😎

Cool video and vind man! +1 sub!

Convert to the Church of Emacs #TheChurchOfEmacs

Guy going "I don't understand, but I have opinions!" for 12 minutes straight.

looks like Emacs with evil mode is the better vi graphical shell🤣

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.

That's for Windows user

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.

That cursor is cursed lol, I hate everything about that

I agree Matt Why NANO is the best LOL GVM.

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.

Doom Emacs though ❤

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.

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.

This isn't an openSUSE video

Uninstalled it 5 seconds after installing it.

No No No!!! You play one on UTube... 🤣 But, you are on my TV... Hahahahaha LLAP 🖖

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

Emacs ls just better vim Matt

guis are good for windows users specifically. cmd sucks

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. 😊

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

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.

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.

Try enabling multigrid. --multigrid

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 :)