I agree and I know what you're saying, but I'm pretty curious: how are people using AI with vim? I've seen some scripts for ollama but what are most people doing?
I agree and I know what you're saying, but I'm pretty curious: how are people using AI with vim? I've seen some scripts for ollama but what are most people doing?
I don't use it this way yet, but aider has a watch mode that would be fun with vim:
https://aider.chat/docs/usage/watch.html
I imagine with vim, from the document you're editing, you'd go:
:ter
to get a terminal. Fire up aider with --watch-files in the terminal. Hop back up to the file and start telling it what to do. Hit L when it's done to see the changes.
That's just a guess but after writing it out I kinda want to try it.
When I use aider it's via its chat interface and then I load the file with vim in another terminal tab to follow along but I think --watch-files with vim would be fun.
At least for Neovim, there are many official or community-made AI autocomplete plugins, and a bunch of chat interfaces as well
tmux + vim + Claude Code
This. With so much of my work being done with Claude Code via terminal, I’ve used vim and tmux more than I have in the 20 years since I was first introduced.
How many people don’t know tmux in the industry is really beyond me.
With all the buzz about orchestrating in the age of CLI agents there doesn't seem to be much talk about vim + tmux with send-keys (a blessing). You can run as many windows and panes doing so many different things across multiple projects.
What's the elevator pitch if I already know Screen and I can just open multiple windows of the terminal emulator?
No pitch - just use screen, most people use tmux in exactly the same way - open a few splits and switch between them with keyboard shortcuts.
I switched from screen to tmux due to rumor about the screen code base. Maybe not a good reason. But I don’t regret it, tmux works well.
Just an honest opinion of someone who didn’t have skin in the game. Not sure if it helps.
same, although I'm using zellij instead of tmux. Copilot works well in vim too.
Nearly this, but using ghostty instead of tmux. You don’t get the remote connection aspect of tmux, but for splitting/zooming/preserving windows it is fantastic. The best part is you can configure natural shortcuts rather than using a leader for everything.
As a tmux user, sell me on ghostty. I hate the leader key, especially in VIM.
The copilot plugin works well
That's good to know. I've never actually tried Copilot. I was going to try this week.
Totally worth it. I tied it to openrouter.ai so that I could use 'all the AI's' (TM)
Totally worth it
AI makes advanced IDE features less relevant (or, more precisely, much easier to ignore or work without.)
I still have PyCharm, especially for working with data which I do a lot it helps quite a bit, but by default I'm back to a very vanilla Vim setup. Others have mentioned tmux which is great and I'd use anyway especially over ssh, but even just terminal tabs for instances of agents are fine frankly.
Avante.nvim is quite active