nayminlwin

I've been coding exclusively in Neovim for about 4 years now.

While it's been awesome, one of the minor pain points is it's inability to render some complex scripts properly. I'm from Burma and Burmese script is part of Indic script family, which also includes Indian language scripts like, Tamil and Devanagari. Now, rendering of these scripts seem to be quite complicated compared to roman scripts or even to CJK scripts.

Searching around the web with my limited knowledge shows there's this term "complex text layout" (CTL) for these kind of scripts. Full GUI editors like emacs seem to have no problem with this since most of them just use this library called harfbuzz that implements CTL.

Now, I've tried a lot of Neovim GUI front-ends to see if they support CTL. Most of them doesn't work. The exceptions are the VSCode plugin (fully works) and Onivim2 (works but have some spacing issue). I'd rather avoid VSCode and Onivim2 seems to be moving toward some kind of freemium/paid model.

There are a few github issues like this that kind of explain the problem with Neovim and complex scripts. It seems mono-spaced sizing is ingrained into the vim protocol itself. May be it works on VSCode and Onivim2 because they're ignoring Neovim's UI protocol and somehow hooking up text rendering to their own existing UI?

Did anyone ever manage to get complex scripts working in Neovim?

Over 10 years ago, I had this sort of a prediction that, with the massive adoption of a dynamic language like javascript on both client/server sides and test-driven development gaining a lot of ground, the future of programming would be dynamic and "feedback-driven". As in, you would immediately see the results of your code as you type, based on the tests you created. To naively simplify, imagine a split screen of your code editor and a console view showing relevant watch expressions from the code you're typing.

Instead what happened was the industry's focus shifted to type safety and smart compilers, and I followed along. I'm just not smart enough to question where the whole industry was heading. And my speck of imagination on how coding would have looked like in the future wasn't completely thought out. It was just that, a speck of imagination that occurred to me as I was debugging something tedious.

Now, most of the programming language world, seem to be focusing on smarter compilers. But is there some language or platform, that focus instead on a different kind of programming paradigm (not sort of OOP, FP paradigm, may be call it the programming workflow paradigm?). May be it comes with a really strong debugger tooling that's constantly giving you feedback on what your code is actually doing. Think REPL on steroids. I can imagine there would be challenges with parsing/evaluating incomplete code syntax and functions. So I guess, the whole compiler/translator side has to be thought out from the ground up as well.

Disclaimer: There's a good chance I simply don't know what I'm talking about because I'm no language designer or even close to understanding how programming languages and it's ecosystems are created. Just sharing some thoughts I had as a junior dev back in the day.