pancakes :nonbinary_cat: (@pancakes)

The boxes in question:

- Minimal interface. noise and notifications to a minimum, it should be possible to hide or at least obscure all panes with a single shortcut

- A good Vim mode. preferably also adopting vim-surround and vim-commentary binds. must support text objects, all types of visual selection, registers, window/pane navigation and commands like :w, :q, :wq and :q! (many vim modes fail this requirement somehow!!!)

- Good, keyboard only multicursor bindings, selecting the next occurrence of the text under the cursor should be simple

- A real-time Markdown preview mode

- Multi-buffers. Listing project-wide diagnostics with context AND allowing editing multiple files at once to go through errors and patch everything up is great + amazing

- Manual configuration of LSP clients and formatters

also

- not a web browser 🙏

@kett at this point why not just neovim? i'm just curious

@pancakes

i do use neovim 99% of the time, but i find that for larger projects it's a little unwieldy and ugly, the fact it's constrained to a terminal means it sometimes slows down or presents some bizarre visual bugs, and everything is constrained to that monospace grid, markdown previews are a no-go there obviously because you can't have text at different sizes.

also the fact that a lot of essential features are lacking by default and require you to install plugins means that a bad update to any one of these plugins might break something as basic as a fuzzy-finder or a file explorer or even your completions. i actually have not updated my plugins in ages because the last few times i did, fun things would happen ranging from completion popups not working anymore, to errors appearing and interrupting me at every single keystroke

this is while i keep my plugins to a minimum, i don't have too crazy a setup at all, neovim is not stable yet, they're on 0.x and every change to that x means a bunch of breaking changes to the api and consequently to the plugins. neovim is great and i love it, but these issues are unacceptable, that's the whole reason why i will sometimes use a graphical text editor, the headaches are fewer.

@kett this is kind of the same reason i jumped to zed the other day
the ai stuff worries me but there's a single toggle
i tried helix and i like it but the lsp breaks very easily and you need to manually install them through your package manager and i don't want a million aur packages