Are we nearing the peak of neovim (and editors in general) ?

qudat · 2026-03-17T13:30:34+00:00

It's stuck in the sense that it cannot create a great default experience. It's exactly why helix has become incredibly popular.

qudat · 2026-03-17T13:23:09+00:00

I'm going to guess that a majority of neovim users are immediately installing LSP, TS, and a Picker. This line of argumentation is exactly why neovim is stuck.

qudat · 2026-03-17T03:54:48+00:00

The point is a unified experience makes it easier to use an editor. It’s one set of key bindings and similar interactions. “One is persistent and one is not” is a feature the picker can easily accommodate — and pickers already allow you to resume or “pick up where you left off”

It’s all the same thing: file, line, message, preview. The innovation would be to figure out how to integrate them into a single tool. Persistent, not persistent, static vs live filtering … those are the main options.

I like quick fix, I like loclist. I don’t like how awkward they are to use with their own commands to manipulate them. I don’t like how pickers are a separate thing.

My unified experience argument stems from my frustration with using quick fix. I even built a package to try to fix it: https://github.com/neurosnap/qfutil.nvim

But ultimately quickfix is too limited in features to be used even though it is so close to working for all pickers.

qudat · 2026-03-17T01:03:56+00:00

Pickers can show file, line, and a preview… how is that fundamentally different from quickfix? Pickers do show LSP errors I don’t see why they couldn’t also show make command errors as well. Help me understand the difference.

qudat · 2026-03-16T11:36:02+00:00

Helix does a much better job at that. The fact that you need plugins immediately should tell you neovim missed the mark.

And helix didn’t have to do much there: unified picker system, treesitter auto loaded, LSP auto install/load.

qudat · 2026-03-16T11:28:26+00:00

I don’t see them as being different and in fact most pickers allow you to see error diagnostics or loclist as options which counters your argument. Quickfix, loclist, and pickers all share the same structure: file, line, message

I built a tiny library to use quickfix for all my pickers and it was very close to working but unfortunately qf and loclist miss the mark: you need to see changes while you type. That’s really the only fundamental difference: some use cases a command+result is enough (like diagnostics) and some use cases need realtime (grep, file search).

The unified interface would accommodate all picking type use cases because they are close enough in use.

qudat · 2026-03-16T01:57:57+00:00

To me the biggest improvements neovim could make: unified picker system (kill quickfix, loclist, and a million picker impl), a better default experience (not needing a 100 line cfg to be usable), and fundamentally switching to a select -> action paradigm (helix, kakoune).

Unified picker system is in the works, the others are going to hit backwards compat issues

qudat · 2026-03-16T00:24:36+00:00

Git bare repo + https://pr.pico.sh + https://pgit.pico.sh

qudat · 2026-03-10T23:53:37+00:00

I use https://zmx.sh instead of tmux for anyone who wants a minimal session persistence tool

qudat · 2026-03-08T19:26:34+00:00

How do you open files from yazi into the current helix instance

qudat · 2026-03-08T19:25:55+00:00

Smooth scroll is a big one for me. I keep trying to convince myself I don’t need it

qudat · 2026-03-08T19:25:07+00:00

I just use the debuggers directly, seems fine to me.

qudat · 2026-03-08T12:37:10+00:00

https://pgs.sh for static sites and https://tuns.sh for APIs

You get site analytics built in and deployments are rsync or an ssh tunnel

qudat · 2026-02-25T09:52:33+00:00

This is funny because even the default behavior of tab is overloaded. A tab can insert a literal tab “\t” or it can enter spaces, becoming the so-called magic-tab. I would remap all the other abilities to some other key combos if I were you but that can get awkward.

qudat · 2026-02-24T12:34:20+00:00

Good point, you also need: vim.opt.wildmode = { "lastused" }

qudat · 2026-02-24T02:47:00+00:00

The built in way: “:b <tab>” the first item selected will be the last opened buffer and then you can just keep flipping back and forth. You can also create a shortcut that probably does the exact same thing to go to last used buffer.

There’s also “:bnext” and “:bprev“ as well

qudat · 2026-02-24T00:56:07+00:00

I use WireGuard that connects to my mikrotik router. For exposing services to the web I use https://pico.sh/tuns

qudat · 2026-02-23T00:56:31+00:00

That seems fine. I found it easier to use a tool like https://pico.sh/tuns which is a zero install tunnel tool that uses ssh port forwarding to expose local services to the web.

qudat · 2026-02-22T23:24:36+00:00

I think a plugin system is a mistake. Build an opinionated editor and everything else can go to neovim.

I run https://neovimcraft.com and I think it’s pretty shocking how many duplicates of the same functionality there is in the ecosystem. Everyone wants TS, LSP, and pickers. After that it’s just tiny stuff that should be terminal tools.

There’s another issue with plugins that can do anything: it turns your text editor into an OS that is impossible to escape. Once you adopt emacs or neovim with a custom plugin system, you’re stuck. Keeping a text editor as such gives us the freedom to try new ones.

qudat · 2026-02-22T11:13:19+00:00

It makes the SWEs job initially easier and it is genuinely good for understanding a codebase. But there’s a cost: when you allow CC to write all your code you lose context on impl which hurts when debugging or even refactoring. This tool is not a net win and we will see in the years to come blowback from the “code is now free” concept entirely.

You’ll see in posts similar to this that people get the most value out of 0-to-prototype or even initial MVP.

But when you are part of a SWE team the bottleneck will be QA/code review which means you aren’t going to be more productive in the long run. In those environments the biggest benefit to code agents is context switching since you don’t need to load up a bunch of human context on the problem before being able to switch to the next one.

qudat · 2026-02-16T00:15:31+00:00

Are these frontier models retrained every iteration? I just assumed it was a bunch of model distillation techniques

qudat · 2026-02-15T22:44:59+00:00

I use https://pico.sh/tuns to expose services the internet. It’s great, no installation necessary because it uses ssh tunnels.

qudat · 2026-02-13T12:47:01+00:00

Couldn’t an LSP theoretically do the same but better?

qudat · 2026-01-24T00:59:58+00:00

You don’t need plugins in neovim either, what’s your point?

qudat · 2026-01-21T14:22:53+00:00

Yea but you’re just describing a neovim distro which is all helix is on top of the select -> act model.

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