Neovide Is A Graphical Neovim Client Written In Rust

for the last year and a half i've been a 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 vm and especially with neo-vim and one of the cool things about neovim is there's a lot of graphical front ends to neo vm 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 neovide which is a graphical neo-vim client written in rust now neovide is available for linux mac and windows just like neovim is available on linux mac and windows you can run neovide on all the operating systems the source code is hosted over on github you can build it yourself for those of you that are running arch or an arch based system you can find neovite in the arch user repositories they also have installation instructions for those of you running debian or ubuntu based instructions here on the github page neovide of course is free in 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 gifs displaying some of what neovide can do and the main thing that neofide 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 neovi and i'm going to launch my bash rc here in neovide and the two big claims to fame with neovide the 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 the really neat animation you can tell exactly where that cursor jumps to because it had that almost sliding effect where in standard film 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 add 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 like it follows you around everywhere if i wanted to select some text you know when i'm selecting text the cursor is 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 neovide from regular neovim just for that smooth scrolling effect i'm not even kidding now how do you configure neovide well neovide remember it's just a graphical front end to neovim itself so neovide just reads your neovim config you're a knit dot vm that should be in your home directory slash dot config slash nvim that's the file that controls neovite as well so let's open up my neovim config so let me go ahead and i'm going to do colon e for edit and i'm going to go to in my home directory dot config slash nvm 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 g vim 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 e-max color scheme the doom one color scheme that doom e-max 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 based neo vim but i never bothered adding gooey 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 neovim 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 mono space font because most people unless you have ever used a gui vim or gooey 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 are going to go have to add that line there i set mine to source code pro which is an open source version of source code pro and this wasn't hard i mean i had to spend i don't know 10 minutes maybe adding some of the various gui options and the gui uh 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 neovide and be happy with it like i could strictly be a neovide user now there are a couple of things that do bug me a little bit with neovide one of them is even though the github page talks about it can display colored emojis again i i it's 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 soft code pro if i set that to joy pixels or noto color emoji or any kind of colored emoji font then 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 emoji.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 uh black and white unicode glyphs here which is fine that is still better than the way neovide handles that 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 soft code pro which probably wouldn't display them anyway 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 that's not a gripe to me because i don't really like transparency but for those of you that like transparency in 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 neovide what you have to do is set the entire uh neovide window as transparent and that's 95 percent transparency there or opacity there and you know it just bleeds through a little bit and i've got it set to such a such minor transparency just very minor transparency because if i set it too light the text is actually transparent like everything in the window even the status bar is transparent so it's completely different than neovim and 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 neovide since it doesn't have true transparency it's the same reason i don't do transparency in emacs emacs is the same way if i set transparency in emacs the entire emax 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 neovite how it is i mean it uses all of my neo-vim key bindings it's again it's using the neo-vim 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 gif you have this one where you get a little trail of characters following the the cursor and that one's called the railgun effect they've got 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 and let me close one of these splits here and what i'm going to do is i'm going to get into command mode i'm going to do a colon and then let g colon neovide underscore cursor underscore vfx underscore mode that's a lot to type and then equals and let's try the railgun effect so that this is the real gun and you see i've got little bubbles appearing outside the uh the cursor when i move so 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 going to get back into command mode 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 except 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 then 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 neovide a graphical neo-vim client written in rust and i 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 100 percent matter of fact it works 100 and it provides a couple of things that honestly i really love i love the cursor animations visually when you're jumping in 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 neovide from my system what i think i might do is i'm going to go ahead and leave it on my system i'm going to go ahead and alias vim on my computer to actually just run neovite now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of this episode i'm talking about absolutely dallas gay blue mitchell allen and comey archery track 30. dave the other david dilling gregory lewis paul scott with steven west and 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 neovite 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 distrotube channel is sponsored by you guys the community if you want to help me out look for distro tube over on patreon alright guys peace we need a neo-vim front end written in haskell

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 60,581

Rating: 4.8822875 out of 5

Keywords: rust vim setup, vim editor, text editor, neovim setup, neovim tutorial, neovim plugins, neovim terminal, neovim client, neovim gui, neovim, neovide, neovide neovim client, vim config, neovim config, neovide config, neovim linux, neovim mac, neovim windows, linux, gnu linux, free software, open source software, neovim mac gui, neovim windows gui, neovim vs vscode

Id: Vd5AACp6GG0

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/sagar_dahiya69]

It doesn't work properly on arch It shows up some sdl2 error :(

[u/Secret_Falcon]

Hi Derek, not sure how to best reach you. I am a contributor for Neovide and have recently created a snap for the project. I liked your video, and I would like to link to it on the snapcraft listing. You can best reach me at [e-mail] and here is my github page https://github.com/j4qfrost. Thanks for making the video! Though with the surge in popularity, I get pinged with a lot of emails. Kethku started to invest a lot more time in the project as a result I think.

The snap is currently in the beta channel and is operating off the opengl branch, since vulkan is a bit of a pain point for most users.