Oh, no, I totally get it. Vim, and its modernized fork Neovim, are phenomenal editors, and they still hold up today – I was born post-9/11 and I still use Neovim for all of text editing needs, from development work to editing config files. It’s just better. That said, I do still like 21st century features like LSP linting and auto complete, drop shadows for floating windows, emoji/nerdfonts, and font ligature support, which Neovim and its frontend Neovide provide.
Neovide is a graphical frontend for Neovim just as gVim is a graphical frontend for Vim. I like to think of it as a terminal emulator that can only run Neovim (although you can still :term from within Neovim to get a shell) and communicates with it via RPC, which allows it to have some fun Neovim-specific extensions like allowing sub-character scrolling, animating the cursor as it jumps around the screen, having window opacity, fullscreen etc. configurable via Vim commands and therefore keybinds, and, of course, all the modern terminal emulation amenities like truecolor, full Unicode support, and ligature support (I’m sorry I just really like Fira Code).
If you haven’t already tried Neovim, and there aren’t any Vim-9.0-specific features you depend on, I highly recommend giving it a shot. It’s 100% backwards compatible with Vim 8 and earlier (after you point it at your existing vim config) and it adds support for Lua scripting, a built-in LSP client that all plugins can access so you don’t have to rely on CoC for everything (although you can continue to use CoC if you so desire), and community support in the form of Neovim-only plugins such as the fantastic telescope.nvim. It really does feel like Vim turned into a full fledged IDE, without sacrificing anything that makes it Vim – including its performance (external memory-hogging LSP servers notwithstanding).
I finally moved to neovim some time ago. I usually find frontends and plugins to be more trouble than they’re worth, but I should probably have a look at that. If it ever ends up in Debian, that is.
Why wait? It’s available from the project page as an AppImage, and if you’d rather build from source, it’s a Rust app – just clone the repo and cargo install --path . (or `cargo install --git https://github.com/neovide/neovide if you’d rather skip that step)
As for GUI frontends being a hassle, though, I hate to say I kind of agree with you, at least at first – I quite like Neovide now that I’ve gotten used to it (and bothered to configure it to my liking), but Konsole has more sensible defaults for sure. I’m also in the habit of :q any time I need to go back to a terminal to compile something and it is incredibly frustrating having my terminal emulator close and my entire editing session disappear on me whenever muscle memory takes over.
