Oni: Modern Modal Editing – Powered by Neovim
I&#x27;ve been using Oni for the last few weeks as my daily driver (I liked it so much I signed up as a monthly sponsor), and here&#x27;s my take on it:<p>It&#x27;s a fairly new project, but it&#x27;s under _very_ active development. There&#x27;s an excellent community building around it and I think we will be seeing some really great progress over the next year. That said, it isn&#x27;t anywhere close to feature parity with vscode, but the value proposition is: neovim, with vscode compatible snippets and typescript-language-server-driven autocomplete (also works with vanilla JS) out of the box. AFAIK it works with any language language server with a few lines of configuration. I have tried several times to get You Complete Me working to my satisfaction and never quite got there despite spending several weekends working on it. Oni just works.<p>The bonus value proposition is: since it is a GUI wrapper around neovim, you get to retain all of the muscle memory you have built up in your years of using vim, but potentially also get all of the goodies that a graphical IDE like vscode provides. I have tried the vscode vim extensions, and they are really impressive, but they are still limited by the vscode extension api and at the end of the day it&#x27;s not a real vim. For me, it was just not-vimish enough to constantly interrupt my flow; I believe the original inspiration for Oni was the creator&#x27;s frustrations with vscode vim extensions.<p>I have been digging into the development process and I&#x27;ve been _really_ impressed with how brilliant and industrious the main contributors are; features are getting added at a breakneck pace. A few things that are in the works: real-time browser pane with auto-refresh (I just tried out the browser feature and it works like it&#x27;s just another vim buffer... pretty awesome stuff!), markdown preview, and a gamified tutor mode for newbies.