Neovim 0.4 released

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Changelog:

Always interesting to see the incremental improvements they manage to build on top of legacy vim. It may provides some inspiration.

Among the many features, it appears that neovim can now handle transparent floating window as shown here: https://twitter.com/delphinus35/status/1144436863182049280

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This feature could be useful in Kakoune where the search suggestions appearing in the bottom-right corner of the screen often overlaps with the buffer content.

I’m gonna dive in the content of :help lua-stdlib to discover the benefits to have an embedded lua interpreter instead of dealing with shell difficult idioms in %sh{} blocks.

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It’s in the terminal?

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I took a peek at the code, yeah, it is, rendered by using color differences (notice no overlapping) and RGB terminals. Damn impressive.

I am so happy for the Neovim project, when it first started up, I gave $250 towards the project, primarily to see Lua become the goto scripting language. This release makes me profoundly happy with

"This release introduces “Nvim-Lua standard library”. See “:help lua-stdlib”.

Justin and the crew over there are doing incredible work. While I have moved on from the *Vim community by and large, I am happy to see a deep, healthy, awesome community around Neovim that will protect Vim’s existence into the longterm future.

I still regret it had to happen via a fork because of Bram’s particularities and resistance to change, in the end it made a much healthy community.

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Lua is still not on the roadmap, but once ncurses is gone, this can be added as part of the terminal ui backend, as we have all the necessary information (main buffer content + menu/info boxes overlapping). The only additional needed data is adding an ‘alpha’ value inside faces, but that does not seem that hard either.

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I wonder how this transparency will look on light theme? As a light theme user I know that any transparency is not as good as in dark themes.

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yes. And I suppose this is done pretty much the same as some applications handle transparency without using compositor, e.g. polybar fake transparency.

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The screenshots look super nice.

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Another nice video on the README of GitHub - liuchengxu/vim-clap: 👏 Modern performant fuzzy picker, tree-sitter highlighting, and more, for both Vim and NeoVim

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Not having transparent menu elements is one reason I reverted the status bar to being at the bottom instead on top. Command mode and help often hide the buffer content.

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Now that the new terminal ui is done/nearing completion is the transparent menu discussed above on the roadmap/planned in the futute?