Gregory Anders on Neovim, Ghostty, and Why Simplicity Wins

Gregory Anders, also known as gpanders, is a core maintainer of Neovim and also the Ghostty terminal. In this conversation, we talk about how he got started with both projects, his take on plugin managers, Lua, and debugging workflows. We go over Ghostty features, how he approaches minimalism in his dev setup,

Link to the video:

https://youtu.be/Nq2T28_ILxc

What's the best way to support me?

https://linkarzu.com/about/#youre-a-fraud-why-do-you-ask-for-money-isnt-youtube-ads-enough

Timeline:

00:00:00 - Highlights

00:03:34 - Neovim contributions

00:05:14 - Ghostty contributions

00:06:28 - Greg's background in IT, computers, education, career

00:10:00 - Experience applying to SpaceX

00:16:05 - How and why did you get started with neovim?

00:19:34 - Debug C++ in Neovim?

00:21:08 - Can you share a bit about the Neovim history, was there a time that Lua was not part of it?

00:26:46 - What are your thoughts on lua?

00:28:49 - Greg doesn't like looking at lua (and I'm being conservative here)

00:29:59 - For Neovim design's goals, could have been a better alternative than lua?

00:31:59 - What is Fennel? LISP that transpiles into lua

00:34:46 - How big is the neovim core team, how easy is it to come to agreements, is there a dictactor?

00:40:20 - Are Echasnovski and Folke part of the Core team?

00:42:21 - Greg uses his own "package manager", thoughts on plugin managers

00:50:59 - Greg doesn't use plugins that need to call require.setup

00:52:49 - What if we look at plugin managers from the perspective of a VScode user

00:56:53 - Experience of having a coworker switch to neovim

00:58:12 - Neovim flexibility of providing you a good base, so you can build on top

01:00:22 - Thoughts on Helix?

01:03:31 - My experience with Obsidian after meeting Neovim

01:04:34 - Thoughts on a lot of new plugins being created all the time?

01:09:05 - WIP: New Neovim plugin manager vim.pack

01:10:44 - Stop using .setup (as most as possible)

01:11:46 - Thoughts on Neovim Extensibility, is it becoming an Emacs?

01:14:25 - Thoughts on auto updating plugins at startup, and also daily driving Neovim on the master branch

01:18:47 - Should you update for security reasons or new features?

01:20:20 - BE REALLY CAREFUL ON THE PLUGINS YOU INSTALL

01:26:12 - What about the Ghostty hype? What Ghostty features matter to Greg

01:28:30 - Thoughts on iTerm

01:30:12 - Ghostty is missing the search feature, like ctrl+f for normies or cmd+f for chads

01:30:51 - Thoughts on Tmux?

01:31:59 - The kitty keyboard protocol (shoutout to Kovid, both of us huge fans)

01:36:41 - Thoughts on other editors like zed, cursor, and thoughts on AI

01:42:52 - Thoughts on claude code

01:44:22 - Whats your preferred operating systems and thoughts about other ones

01:45:24 - How does the Windows Neovim package work, is it native?

01:47:17 - If you're a Neovim Windows user watching, a windows core maintainer is needed

01:49:08 - Here comes the apple pill for you rust furry boys

01:53:24 - Apple's walled garden, it's so comfortable here, come on in

01:56:12 - Do your airpods stay connected to the phone for some reason?

01:58:22 - What do other think about your love for apple, do you get criticized?

02:00:02 - What keyboard do you use? keychron Q11

02:04:43 - I use a glove80, but still, apple's external keyboard is my favorite

02:10:15 - Do you use any window manager?