| layout | title | category | permalink |
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newsletter |
Neovim: The Work Continues |
newsletter |
/news/2021/09 |
The Citadel found some of my... experiments... too bold. —Qyburn
Nvim 0.5.1 has been released, it includes many fixes and some breaking changes:
- changed LSP handler signature: neovim/neovim#15504
- renamed
vim.register_keystroke_callback=>vim.on_key
These breaking changes are part of the 0.5.1 maintenance release to avoid delay while we develop 0.6.
Lua-first is now a central practice in the Neovim project.
We started with everything tucked into vim.lsp. The community began heavily
building on vim.lsp.diagnostic, it became clear that this "diagnostic"
concept had more general value beyond only LSP.
The development of vim.diagnostic diagnostic framework from concept, to
interface design, to delivery was a matter of weeks, thanks to @gpanders.
The vim.diagnostic API is available in Nvim master (unreleased 0.6) and we are considering it for 0.5.2 stable release.
Though the Nvim RPC API is bound by a sacred contract, in other areas of Nvim we are now more aggressively deprecating and reworking interfaces. We are fundamentally committed to backwards compatibility for the RPC API and will eventually adopt that commitment in the Lua interface. Meanwhile, we reserve the option of breaking things in Lua-land. Such breakage is collected and announced in the Following HEAD thread.
This liberty has allowed us to move 10x faster.
@bfredl continues to improve Lua and Vimscript "runtime path" behavior to be intuitive, useful, and fast.
The model of "core framework, external dust cloud" has proven out. nvim-treesitter external project is heavily experimenting and some of its ancillary efforts such as UI "widgets" are finding their way back to core.
nvim-lspconfig saw heavy churn for 1+ years and is now settling down. Some of its utilities such as :LspInfo and the "root finder" mechanism are being considered as core Nvim feature.
Nvim supports init.lua as user config since 0.5, and in 0.6. we are working on nvim -l to support invoking Lua "main" scripts with nvim.
The Language Server Protocol (LSP) is an open, JSON-RPC protocol for communication between code editors and language servers, which provide programming language-specific features such as completion, hover/tooltips, go to definition, show/go to references, show method signatures, rename, refactoring.
Nvim's builtin vim.lsp LSP framework
plus nvim-lspconfig quickstart collection has been a major success,
demonstrating the viability of shipping ambitious ideas in core Nvim using Lua.
Nvim core developers use it to accelerate their work in Nvim's C and Lua source code.
Work on semantic highlighting continues.
Work on nvim-treesitter parser integration continues: performance, bug-fixes.
Also, Neovim itself only provides a (Lua) API for generating and querying the syntax tree using the bundled tree-sitter library; see :h treesitter. User-facing features like the ones mentioned above are implemented in plugins like XXX and XXX.
- "ghost text" (virtual lines) neovim/neovim#15351
Nvim master branch has implemented a big batch of improvements to the editor defaults, including:
- 'backupdir' now auto-creates its directory, as the 'undodir' and 'directory' (swapfile) options already do
CTRL-Lis mapped to also clear "/" search highlighting- 'inccommand' (live preview of the
:substitutecommand) is enabled by default Yis mapped to behave likeDandC🙀
Having now established patterns for "default autocommands" and "default
mappings", we will use this mechanism liberally to make quality-of-life
improvements to nvim -u NONE without breaking scripts.
Your feedback helps us. We considered removing the 'backspace' option and decided to keep it based on comments explaining the use cases for some of its non-default behavior. We also asked about :hardcopy and found that it's relatively unknown but still sees usage; we will not remove its implementation until we have a complete answer for inscribing your pixels to paper.
vim.mpack now exposes a Lua-first messagepack encoder/decoder without
marshalling through Vimscript. This also sets the stage for eliminating
a dependency on libmsgpack in favor of libmpack.
vim.json exposes a Lua-first JSON encoder/decoder without marshalling through
Vimscript. This performance gain is helpful in the LSP client, where JSON
de/serialization dominates the cost of many client activities.
Nvim core team has fully migrated to GitHub Actions for CI, and we are leaning heavily on this to automate even more of our workflow.
Nvim C source code is now fully reformatted to match our style guide, so that our development workflow favors auto-formatting instead of tedious human-driven compliance with the style guide. This is especially important for reducing friction of merging patches from upstream Vim.
Upstream improvements in libuv and Windows 10 allow us to eliminate our libuv fork. Note that going forward we consider Windows 8 or older is unsupported, particularly for TUI/TTY bug reports.
Of the over XXX commits in this release, about XXX were patches and runtime updates ported from Vim.
Nvim master branch is up-to-date with Vim runtime files.
In keeping with the motto of this newsletter, one of the most noticeable positive changes was the growth of the community and of new ways of interacting with it.
Previously, support requests and discussions were spread across Reddit, Gitter, and GitHub Discussions and were either ephemeral or hard to search for. We have now consolidated around a new Neovim Discourse, which is a free and open source forum platform with mailing list and RSS features, in addition to a nice web interface. The Neovim Discourse is an official core project and moderated by core team members.
The official chatroom for Neovim is on matrix.
Community members and Neovim core developers will speak at Vimconf.live.
Neovim core developers @vigoux and @tjdevries continue to stream on Twitch.
Active Neovim developmers continues to grow. In the last three months, there were XXX unique commit authors.
You can now sponsor Neovim via Github Sponsors or OpenCollective.
BountySource is no longer recommended.