[HN Gopher] Interview with TJ DeVries, Neovim core maintainer
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       Interview with TJ DeVries, Neovim core maintainer
        
       Author : tambourine_man
       Score  : 119 points
       Date   : 2021-09-06 10:14 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (changelog.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (changelog.com)
        
       | tjdevries wrote:
       | Hi, tjdevries here.
       | 
       | Happy to try and answer any questions about the podcast or neovim
       | generally :)
        
         | AJRF wrote:
         | Nothing to ask but just wanted to say you seem like one of the
         | most approachable people in open source. You are creating a
         | great model to follow for developers of all walks of life,
         | thanks for everything you do!
        
           | tjdevries wrote:
           | Wow, this is such an incredibly kind message! I had a really
           | big smile on my face reading it. :)
           | 
           | I really appreciate it and hope I can live up to the standard
           | I'm trying to set. Hope you have a really great day!
        
         | dfdz wrote:
         | Hi tjdevries, I have been thinking about switching to neovim
         | from vim.
         | 
         | Do you have any advice/reference for setting up Latex Synctex
         | (Forward and Backwards search) for neovim and evince (on
         | Linux)?
         | 
         | From looking online there seem to be several possible
         | approaches for doing this in neovim (currently in Vim I use an
         | adapted version of evince_dbus.py from the latex gedit latex
         | plugin but it was a pain to get set up!)
        
           | tjdevries wrote:
           | I have to phone a friend in this one. I don't know much about
           | latex in neovim these days.
           | 
           | I pinged a buddy of mine to hopefully be able to respond here
           | though!
        
             | tjdevries wrote:
             | Ok, got some responses from him (I don't know what any of
             | these things mean haha):
             | 
             | vimtex works perfectly on neovim (in fact, the main
             | developer uses neovim) and is very well documented
             | 
             | texlab (the latex lsp server) also does build and forward
             | search (although there's a small bug at the moment)
             | 
             | Oh, and backward search needs neovim-remote (\o/ mhinz);
             | just use nvr --remote +"%line" "%file" as backward search
             | command
             | 
             | https://github.com/lervag/vimtex/blob/5d1335d095d11f48a6744
             | f...
             | 
             | (the vimtex dev uses Zathura, so that may be an alternative
             | viewer to look into)
        
               | dfdz wrote:
               | Just to follow up, my attempts to get vimtex to work
               | unfortunately were unsuccessful. However, along the way
               | reading neovim plugin docs I started to figure out the
               | difference between neovim and vim and was able to get
               | things working via the following process:
               | 
               | sudo dnf install neovim
               | 
               | sudo dnf install python3-neovim
               | 
               | mkdir -p ~/.config/pack/foo/opt/mytex
               | 
               | cd ~/.config/pack/foo/opt/mytex
               | 
               | [download
               | https://github.com/peterbjorgensen/sved/ftplugin]
               | 
               | cp ~/.vimrc ~/.config/nvim/init.vim
               | 
               | add the line "packadd mytex" to init.vim
               | 
               | add the line "alias vim='nvim'" to ~/.bashrc :)
        
               | dfdz wrote:
               | Thank you for the detailed answer, I really appreciate
               | it.
               | 
               | It it great to know that the main developer for vimtex
               | uses neovim.
               | 
               | I will try the neovim/vimtex/zathura combination used by
               | the dev!
        
               | tambourine_man wrote:
               | You gotta love HN. Threads like this just makes you
               | smile.
        
         | Karsteski wrote:
         | Hey TJ, I'm a newb programmer that's switching to Neovim from
         | VS Code. I just want to say thanks for making vim more
         | accessible. You have done great work :)
        
           | tjdevries wrote:
           | Awesome
           | 
           | One of us! One of us! One of us! ;)
        
         | jez wrote:
         | Has Neovim ever considered to a rolling release model?
         | 
         | Where I work, it's considerably less of a headache to install
         | Homebrew bottles instead of source/HEAD packages. There was a
         | bug in Neovim 0.4 that I ran into every day for years--it was
         | fixed in master but unreleased for a long time. I just had the
         | same thing happen in 0.5.0: there's a bug, it's already fixed
         | in master, but I can't upgrade to HEAD.
         | 
         | The 0.5.0 release was obviously a historic release (tree sitter
         | integration, LSP built-in, lua config engine) but the release
         | was delayed for a long time. I'd love to know the team's
         | thoughts for or against having some sort of rolling release
         | schedule (or other strategy) to release earlier and/or more
         | frequently.
        
           | tjdevries wrote:
           | Rolling release is kind of hard. We want to make sure that we
           | keep our promises that we've set forth in `:help api-
           | contract` and other expectations about semver. We think this
           | is very beneficial for the plugin writing community. It's
           | also hard because sometimes we merge something into master,
           | before a release, and then recognize that a change to an API,
           | an extension, etc. may be necessary for a feature to truly be
           | great. Rolling release can make some of these things very
           | hard.
           | 
           | However, we're hoping to release more often now to prevent
           | this kind of situation.
           | 
           | I'm not 100% the person to talk to about releases, I
           | primarily just try and write code to make Lua more fun to use
           | :)
           | 
           | Side Note: You can install the HEAD of neovim easily with
           | brew. `brew install neovim --HEAD` I think will do that for
           | you. I'm not sure if that's what you mean by source/HEAD
           | packages or not (I have no idea anything about Mac).
        
       | p2hari wrote:
       | Hi TJ Devries, thanks so much for all your efforts and helping
       | newbs like us to get into VIM ..
        
         | tjdevries wrote:
         | My pleasure :) I have tons of fun doing it!
        
       | tambourine_man wrote:
       | Previous episode on (classic) Vim was also great, with a
       | wonderful cast:
       | 
       | https://changelog.com/podcast/450
        
       | adamstac wrote:
       | Adam here from Changelog.com. There's a transcript as well if
       | you'd like to read or scan the conversation.
        
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       (page generated 2021-09-06 23:02 UTC)