> I also find the VSCode similarities distracting and it seems to be causing confusion to would be investors of this due to the assumption it's some branch of it as opposed to a completely new editor.
I agree, this is consistent feedback we get... There's a ton of potential to have a built-for-modal-editing UX that we're missing at the moment.
> Finally, is there a way to remove the system bar on the top in the configuration? I can toggle most elements of the UI but that system bar is visible even in zen mode and I never use it in any text editor with support for keyboard driven commands.
In terms of performance, the way we build applications today is such a low bar that IMO it opens the door for functional programming. Even if it is not as fast as C or raw assembly - if it is significantly faster than Electron, but preserves the developer ergonomics... it can be a win for the end user!
I created an Electron (TypeScript/React) desktop application called Onivim [1] and then re-built it for a v2 in OCaml / ReasonML [2] - compiled to native machine code. (And we built a UI/Application framework called Revery [3] to support it)
There were very significant, tangible improvements in performance:
- Order of magnitude improvement in startup time (time to interactive, Windows 10, warm start: from 5s -> 0.5s)
- Less memory usage (from ~180MB to <50MB). And 50MB still seems too high!
The tooling for building cross-platform apps on this tech is still raw & a work-in-progress - but I believe there is much untapped potential in taking the 'React' idea and applying it to a functional, compile-to-native language like ReasonML/OCaml for building UI applications. Performance is one obvious dimension; but we also get benefits in terms of correctness - for example, compile-time validation of the 'rules of hooks'.
> However, I really don't like the fact that there is no way to navigate tabs using vim's commands.
There's a related feature request here: https://github.com/onivim/oni2/issues/3673
> I also find the VSCode similarities distracting and it seems to be causing confusion to would be investors of this due to the assumption it's some branch of it as opposed to a completely new editor.
I agree, this is consistent feedback we get... There's a ton of potential to have a built-for-modal-editing UX that we're missing at the moment.
> Finally, is there a way to remove the system bar on the top in the configuration? I can toggle most elements of the UI but that system bar is visible even in zen mode and I never use it in any text editor with support for keyboard driven commands.
Yes, there is a `window.menuBarVisibility` configuration setting: https://onivim.github.io/docs/configuration/settings#layout