layout: newsletter

title: "Newsletter #8 - Open up the Windows"

category: newsletter

permalink: /news/2017/05/

@timeyyy here representing the Neovim Team.

As One of Neovim's goals is to be welcoming to Contributors, I thought i would comment on my experiences being new to the team and all. In short, It has been a Blast!

I can strongly encourage anyone to get involved if you have been thinking about it. The community is a friendly place to be. Come join us!

We are very happy to announce the release of version [0.2](https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/tag/v0.2.0).

Features

- **Windows Support** see [Install Instructions](https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Installing-Neovim) and [ongoing work](https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/5229)

- **Binares** For windows and OSX platforms

Community Projects

Let's take a look at some projects that have sprung up recently.

Now this is a cool project - Bidirectional interface between Sublimetext and Neovim. This project could be used as a reference design to port to different editors as long as you have the ability to intercept all input.

The steps required to make this work (Straight from the horse's mouth)

- sublime-facing code intercepts keys and handles reading/writing sublime state and listening for sublime events

- neovim-facing code inputs keys and handles reading/writing vim state

- glue code in the middle handles efficient synchronization

- a pile of forked libraries (neovim, msgpack, asyncio, etc) hacked up to work in the sublime environment

We also have a bonus example from the project. The popup menu(PUM) has been recently externalized from the grid, allowing

clients to draw the widget as they like. Actualvim has externalized the PUM in around [~100LOC](https://github.com/lunixbochs/ActualVim/commit/bd214f980688546926c17ec84418446674f62f27). A picture can be seen [here](https://github.com/lunixbochs/ActualVim/issues/57#issuecomment-286452725)

Some students have studied the Architecutre of Neovim. The [results](https://delftswa.gitbooks.io/desosa-2017/content/neovim/chapter.html) look awesome.

Development Goodies

- **Externalized Tabline** - Thanks @dzhou121

Every UI component that is externalized means that nvim can run faster.

- More static analysis (PVS studio). We now have static analysis by coverity, clang-scan, clang ASan/UBSan, clint, luacheck, and PVS

- [Floating Windows in the Terminal!](https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/6619)

- [Window Specific Background Color](https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/6597)

- [Externalized cmdline](https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/6162)

- [Windows Terminal UI](https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/6315)

- `:Terminal` in Windows

- pre-build packages(Appimage) for Linux (https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/6638)

Misc

- [Libuv](https://github.com/libuv/libuv/issues/1287) might be getting support

for cygwin and other platforms. This is great new for Neovim!

- [Neomutt](https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt/pull/415) may be getting a lua based testing infrastructure similar to ours.

- ZyX's [eval.c refactor](https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/5119) was also merged,

paving the way for the built-in lua for 0.3. We cannot wait!

- The [road map](https://neovim.io/roadmap/) has got your back if you need a quick overview of

what is to come.

- For a complete list of Neovim features [:help vim-differences](https://neovim.io/doc/user/vim_diff.html)

- @brammool (creator of vim), as well as @chrisbra (vim contributor) have left a few comments on our issue tracker, it's nice to be working together!

Thank you sponsors, and thank you @justinmk @brammool et al for the awesome project.

—Timothy C. Eichler (@timeyyy)