There are really two questions here: 1) Should I use a GUI for Vim, and 2) How is MacVim different from other Vim GUIs. Is there a great improvement from the terminal application? in iTerm2 you can tell it to launch MacVim when you click on a file path), etc. Features MacVim support include being bundled as a Mac app, can bind menu items to TouchBar, supports touch pad gestures, drag-and-drop, full-screen support, can launch using a mvim:// protocol (e.g. You can read up on MacVim's docs though no here. I will try to update it in this week or so. Other than that I would have asked you to read the project's README but it's embarrassingly empty despite the number of users MacVim has and I have no excuse for that.
#Macvim vs vimr for mac#
As I mentioned there is no other gVim implementation for Mac using Cocoa (the current APIs that Apple supports). What are those added features worth maintaining it and merging regularly? Windows / Linux GTK) tend to be more barebones.
MacVim also provides a much more comprehensive implementation to work / feel / look like a native masOS app (and therefore a lot more code and files) and bundled as such, whereas most gVim implementation (e.g. Back then collaboration was not as widely done and a lot of these started as forks (but I wasn't involved then), and by now I think the project is distinct enough that it would be somewhat hard to merge all that back to Vim. However, most of them were for older versions of macOS, and the closest one to MacVim, vim-cocoa, has not been updated for a while, meaning MacVim is the only actively-maintained gVim implementation for Vim now (not counting NeoVim).Īs for why it is a separate project rather than merged upstream to Vim, I think the answer is mostly history.
You can see a decent list of choices in this archived Vim download page.
#Macvim vs vimr mac osx#
Because of that, there were quite a few Vim forks that aimed to bring gVim to the Mac (MacOS 9, Mac OSX Carbon, macOS Cocoa). There was an old implementation for Carbon (now-deprecated API) in Vim but it was quite barebones, and hasn't been working for a while (just for reference you can see this thread which discussed removing the vestigial Carbon-based gVim implementation from the Vim source). But the basic story is Vim never really got a good gVim implementation for Mac. This project was before my time as it's more than a decade old ( original page) and the project switched maintainer a few times already (I only became maintainer in 2018).
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