VimR — Vim Refined

Pre-built binaries • http://vimr.org

UPDATE

We recently, June 2016, started to migrate the MacVim backend (VimR-MacVim) to a NeoVim backend. It's a complete rewrite in Swift for which we use Objective-C when appropriate. We experimented with NeoVim a bit (nvox) and now we are confident enough to think that VimR can be backed by NeoVim. It will take some time though till the transition/rewrite is complete. Bear with us!

If you are here for VimR-MacVim, use the macvim/master branch and the version 0.8.0 (32).

About

Project VimR is an attempt to refine the Vim experience. The goal is to build an editor that uses NeoVim inside with many of the convenience GUI features similar to those present in modern editors.

There are other working NeoVim GUIs for OS X, e.g. NyaoVim, neovim-dot-app, etc., why another?

• play around (obviously) with NeoVim,
• play around with Swift (and especially with RxSwift) and
• (most importantly) have fun!

SwiftNeoVim

SwiftNeoVim is VimR's Cocoa Framework which bundles everything, e.g. NeoVim's runtime-files, needed to embed NeoVim in a Cocoa App. It is really easy to embed NeoVim in your own App: Just add an instance of NeoVimView somewhere in your App and that's it! 😎 (You can treat it as any other NSView-subclasses)

TBD: More details.

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If you want to support VimR financially, you can use Bountysource. Big thanks to all who did support: We've spent the first 99€ for a year's worth of Apple's Developer Program as you may have noticed from the code-signed snapshot builds. Seriously you guys@Apple; You should make it free for free App makers and open source developers.

Download

Pre-built binaries can be found under Releases.

Already Implemented Features

• Multiple windows.
• Basic input including Emojis and Hangul (+Hanja): We don't know whether other input systems work...
• Basic mouse support: Left button actions and scrolling.
• Fuzzy file finder a la Xcode's "Open Quickly..."
• Basic trackpad support: Pinching for zooming and two-finger scrolling.
• Ligatures: Turned off by default. Turn it on in the Preferences.
• Basic File and Edit menu items.
• Command line tool

Planned Features

The following are features we plan to implement (some of which are already present in VimR-MacVim). Bear in mind that we only recently started to completely rewrite VimR, which means it will take some time to have them all implemented. In no particular order:

• Some more standard OSX menu items.
• Improved rendering and input handling, especially Hangul/Hanja (Why is Korean so important? 🤔): The current implementation is really ugly and messy...
• File browser
• Flexible workspace model a la JetBrain's IDEs: For this we'd probably port and extend qvworkspace to Swift
• Preview for some file types, e.g. Markdown, HTML, etc.
• ...

We will gradually create issues with more details.

Stuff with Question Marks

• Minimap
• Some kind of plugin system which utilizes the preview and the workspace model (does NSBundle-loading work in Swift, too? If yes, how does it go with code signing?)
• ...

How to Build

First install homebrew, then:

xcode-select --install # install the Xcode command line tools
brew install carthage # install Carthage for dependency management
brew install libtool automake cmake pkg-config gettext ninja # install libs and tools for neovim

carthage update --platform osx

git submodule update --init
cd neovim
ln -s ../local.mk local.mk
cd ..

xcodebuild -configuration Release -target VimR # VimR.app will be placed in build/Release

If you encounter /usr/local/Library/ENV/4.3/sed: No such file or directory, then try the following:

cd neovim
make distclean
brew reinstall -s libtool

Then xcodebuild again in the project root folder. (See GH-263)

Project Setup

Artifacts Hierarchy

VimR.app
+-- SwiftNeoVim.framework
    +-- NeoVimView
    +-- runtime files for NeoVim
    +-- NeoVimServer
        +-- libnvim
        +-- other libs for NeoVim

Libraries for NeoVim

• The library libiconv is linked by the linker flag -liconv. The version bundled with OSX will be linked.
• The library libintl should be installed by homebrew and is statically linked by explicitly using the linker flag /usr/local/opt/gettext/lib/libintl.a.
• Other libraries used by NeoVim, which are automatically built by building libnvim, are linked by adding them to the Xcode project.

License

MIT