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Coen D. Needell

Neovim for Data Science

After a 20+ year interregnum, the terminal is back with a vengeance.

More and more data scientists are ditching windows and becoming more intimately familiar with their computers. Data science and the command line are a match made in heaven; powerful data-wrangling capabilities have available to Unix users since the 1970s. Tools for programming are getting lighter and lighter. A decade ago programmers all used Eclipse and Jetbrains, these giant, lumbering creatures of the JVM. Nowadays the most popular tool for programming is Visual Studio Code, a modular text editor. This allows the programmer to only spend cycles on the features they desire.

Lurking in the ripples of this development is Vim, a relict beast born of the accursed silicon and plastic of the Atari ST. With Lua, Vim begat Neovim, and that is where our story focuses.

Through the power of Lua and the philosophy of Vim, can we create a better IDE for the data scientist? And can we do it all on the command line?

2022-12-15
https://coen.needell.org/project/nvim_data/ Coen D. Needell

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Neovim for Data Science, Part 1: Scripting

Vim, “the ubiquitous text editor”, has been with us since the 1980s, with new programmers discovering its arcane power every day. It was originally developed for the Atari ST under the name “Stevie” (ST Editor for VI Enthusiasts), and was later ported to Unix and OS/2 (a precursor to Windows). Originally, vim was simply an Atari port of vi1:, which in turn was the visual mode for the command line text editor ex2.
2022-12-23
https://coen.needell.org/post/neovim_for_data_science_1/ Coen D. Needell