11mo ago

People that use Neovim really like Neovim | More than any other code editor, people using it want to keep using it | 2024 Stacked Overflow Developer Survey

Based on answers to the following question:

Which development environments did you use regularly over the past year, and which do you want to work with over the next year? Please check all that apply.

Neovim is the most admired code editor in the 2024 Stacked Overflow Developer Survey

Source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#admired-and-desired-new-collab-tools-desire-admire

49 comments

Discord as the 2nd most desired sync comm. tool with 71% admire score
fucking zoomers
- Discord is designed and implemented better than all of the other options I've used. I think I've used 10 of them.
  
  Could I ask why? I've got an idea for a competitor
  
  just note that actually very few of them have native apps so... and mind digital sovereignty and privacy. also discord doesn't work well outside of chromium, contributing to this dreadful web monopolization.
Sunk cost fallacy lol
- Stockholm Syndrome tbh
Love how the lowest 3 are Eclipse, NetBeans, and Code::Blocks
- Those are the 3 I was forced to use in Uni. Only one missing is Bluejay
  
  These companies really do have a competition going for who can make the shittiest Java IDE, huh
- Code::Blocks is a step up from Bloodshed DevCpp, which was outdated the moment we started using it, but our teacher was a hardcore "I only need a netbook with Windows XP to program my games" kind of guy. He loved programming games for game systems that were older than him 😂. Good on him for being content to work on a 10" screen though.
I'm not surprised at Helix's numbers, either. I wish we could sort by Admired; I think the picture would be more interesting.
Using my newly patented VisualSort, it looks like it'd go:
NeoVim
Visual Studio Code
Rider
DataGrip
IPython
Goland
Vim
Helix ... 27 others
So, in the top 22%. And I think some of the others are cheating & cutting themselves short at the same time, because vim and nvim are fairly indistinguishable, and isn't Goland based on IntelliJ?
What's weird is that I've never heard of Rider or DataGrip[^1], yet Kakoune isn't even on the list.
Sad to see Netbeans sink so far, though; back in the day, when I was a Java developer, it was my favorite, being far lighter weight than Eclipse and having a really decent WYSIWYG GUI designer. Nobody uses Java for desktop apps anymore, though, do they?
[^1] Edit: oh. .NET, and SQL. Well, I guess you could consider both to be programming languages if you squint a bit.
Edit #2: surveys are hard, but I really take exception to their OS survey, which they sum up as "windows is the most popular," and then they have Linux broken up into 5 major distributions, and then yet another catch-all for "other distribution." Windows is just "Windows," not "Windows 11," "Windows 10," "Windows XP," and "other Windows" (although they do break out WSL). And that's not even counting Android. If you add up all of the Linuxes, it's more popular than Windows (by this survey).
Seriously, who wrote this?
- Vim and Neovim are fairly indistinguishable
  You mean apart from being able to write plugins in Lua instead of Vimscript?
  
  I'm sure there are more differences; nvim has plugins written in every language. One reason I stepped away from it is because, for development, I was using a fair number of plugins, and i noticed the starting nvim would launch nodejs, a Python runtime, a Java VM, Lua runtimes... I started to feel as if I might as well be using emacs.
  So, yes: you're right. NeoVim has more features than plain vim, including a dozen different plugin managers and the ability to write plugins in almost any language. I meant that, from an editing modality, they're very similar.
  
  Regular vim has that (as a compile option, like most of its features).
- [^1] Edit: oh. .NET, and SQL. Well, I guess you could consider both to be programming languages if you squint a bit.
  I'm hoping they'll have a separate Query Language list. We need to know more query languages because SQL has wayyy too much power, IMO.
Neovim is rather wonderful. I haven't yet seen good plugins for OpenAPI specs, so, I'm stuck with VSCode for that but, it really is my go-to.
why is vscodium listed separately by the way, it's literally built from exactly the same code as vscode, just without the proprietary licensing, ms branding and using openvsix extension gallery by default
- I would guess to see how many people go out of their way to use vscodium over vscode.
This popped in my feed. What is it? I'm interested.
- http://neovim.io/
- vim but with a cult
  
  Soooo... vim ?
  
  Don't besmirch the cult of vim like that!
  
  This presumes vim itself isn't already a cult. In fact... I don't think you're pure of thought enough yet. Go write a new statusline and don't get back to me until you're fully satisfied with it
  
  I'm not sure I know what you mean.
- It's a fork of Vim but the codebase has been cleaned up to remove complexity due to legacy hardware support. It allows the use of Lua for configuration and plugin implementation instead of VimScript, which allows plugins to be written in a sanely designed, high performance scripting language, allowing plugin developers to build more complex plugins more easily without dragging down editor performance (VimScript comparability is maintained though). It has a built in implementation of LSP. Plugins written in other languages can communicate with the application via a msgpack API so deciding to support other programming languages for plugin development at compile time is not necessary.
  
  comparability
  *compatibility
THERE IS ANOTHER
- That one didn't score as high, but I think it's because it hasn't matured yet. Linux support is in beta last I heard.
  
  Plus, an editor that isnt linux first is a super mega behemoth ick. Hard pass.
I must be a minority then. I tried it once - as in, I made a real, honest attempt at liking it and making it work for me - and all it managed to do is show me it's buggy and confused, and to convince me to steer well clear of it and stick to vanilla Vim.
I really really dislike Neovim.
Also, I question the vailidy of a survey in which VSCode is 13 times more "desired" - whatever that means, it's not like it's hard to procure - than VSCodium, given that VSCodium is VSCode sans the Microsoft spyware. Makes no sense to me...
- I understand not liking the vim way of doing things (which seems not to be the case for you), but I've never heard anyone describe neovim as buggy. Not throwing shade, genuinely curious. What bugs did you encounter, and when was it?
  Edit: I missed that you posted a link there. Interesting.
- Most people don’t even know VSCodium exists so that makes perfect sense
  What would make sense is that people who know what VSCodium is answer the survey while those who don't refrain. Then you would see fairly identical scores for VSCode and VSCodium.
  What this survey demonstrates is that people express opinions about stuff they know nothing about.
  VSCode has a better selection of extensions.
  True. I'm aware some extensions don't work in VSCodium. But I've yet to run into one myself.
  Having said that, I'm not a VSCod(e|ium) user myself, so it's not like I'm a specialist I'm forced to know enough to support my users, and what I've seen of VSCodium so far is that it has almost zero downside for the invaluable upside of not feeding data to Microsoft.
  But naturally I'm a Vim user through and through, and we Vim / Neovim / whatever VI clone floats your boat don't need no Microsoft-made Electron resource pig to do our work, as you well know 🙂
- "Desired" and "Admired" are very strangle labels, it like the question(s) might have been:
  Which development environments did you use regularly over the past year, and which do you want to work with over the next year? Please check all that apply.
  In which case VSCodes high "desired" score just means that it was widely used?
- I remember that post. I'm surprised that nobody has run into that problem until now. Did you open up an issue on the Neovim GitHub repository?
  I ask because I don't see one and I want try to replicate the issue. I'll report it myself if I'm able to.
  
  I don't care enough to bother, to be honest. Neovim, like Vim, is just a tool to me. It failed me, I moved on. I have more interesting things to spend my time on.
- I don't know how to open that post on my instance so I can reply to it, but if you're willing to give it another shot, I figured out how to get indentexpr= to apply to all buffers from init.vim, using an auto command. Add this to your init.vim:
  vimscript
  
  autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile,VimEnter * set indentexpr= set indentexpr=
  
  You can get to the post using this link: https://threadiverse.link/lemmy.sdf.org/post/18253296
  It's awesome that you were able to find a solution!
  
  Ah, thanks for your efforts, you're very kind. But I'm done with Neovim. It's already wasted more of my time that it was ever going to be worth.
  I wanted to try Neovim to give Treesitter a spin. In the end, I went with something much simpler that works immediately and without drama in Vim and does what I really wanted all along: simple, dumb autocompletion.
  
  I think I found a more direct way. I'm still looking into the details though.
- given that VSCodium is VSCode sans the Microsoft spyware
  Can't use Pylance in VSCodium /rant
  It's one of vscode's killer features (at least for Python), and I can't live without it (I tried).
  Yes, I don't like it either; I wish I could use Pylance in Neovim or anything else LSP-enabled, but it is what it is.

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