To each his choice. Personally I set 'cmdheight' to at least 2 to avoid it bobbing up and down too much; OTOH for the sake of screen space I set 'winminheight' to zero, 'winheight' to 9999, 'helpheight' to 9999 and 'noequalalways', so all non-current windows get reduced to just a status line and nothing else (that's what I call "Rolodex Vim" as in an old-fashioned Rolodex card file where the current card is open in full and all others are reduced to only an index each at top or bottom).
So I'm not going to :set ch=0 ; but if Bram is willing to provide it and some people want to use it that's OK for me: one of the things I like a lot in Vim is its customizability: each user may use it in his/her own way, and indeed several people may obtain the same result by means of different commands. The problem when you start providing some feature is that people are going to use it, and then you need an extremely good reason to remove it (not just "I asked around the office and no one was using it"). As a counter-example, some years ago (a decade or two maybe) the Firefox developers removed the ability to go to the Firefox "home page" at Mozilla by clicking an icon at the top right corner of the Firefox window. A very little thing, but immediately several users raised the hue and cry, saying (the equivalent of) "Why did you remove that feature? I was using it and I liked it a lot". The "official" answer was "It isn't discoverable and no one is using it, it won't come back". The bug was RESOLVED WONTFIX — that or maybe INVALID, I don't remember. Happily enough for us, AFAIK Bram is conscious of this, and he is very cautious about removing an established feature (and when he does it's always with good reason). To the point that when introducing the floating-point feature he felt obliged to explain that "if you compile with +float, the expression 7.5 (with no spaces around the dot) will mean 'the floating point seven-and-a-half' and no longer the string '75' i.e. '7' concatenated with '5'". He even asked around if anyone was using this old meaning of that same expression, to make sure that this "compatibility break" would bother approximately nobody. I approve of that: Better overdoing it a little than failing to notice how people, if any, are using what you're going to remove. Best regads, Tony. On Tue, Aug 30, 2022 at 11:32 PM Gianmaria Bajo <[email protected]> wrote: > > Another thing you would lose, and that I could not accept losing, is the > partial command you've typed, as when there is some pending operator, or the > 'f' key. It couldn't even be shown somewhere else with a plugin, as far as I > know. > > Il giorno martedì 30 agosto 2022 alle 23:23:47 UTC+2 Gianmaria Bajo ha > scritto: >> >> Just my 2 cents. >> >> For me it's utterly useless. >> >> You lose the messages, even if they show up somewhere else, they would show >> up in a wrong/more difficult place to read, it would be distracting. For >> messages, the most natural place is the bottom line. This reason alone would >> be enough for me never to use it. >> You lose the feedback about the size of the visual area as Bram said, I also >> use it. >> You lose feedback from commands. For example I have >> >> nnoremap \W :noau wall<cr> >> >> and in the command line I can see if some file was actually written. >> >> The advantage is zero, one more line is nothing if you lose the message area >> that you'll need to reimplement necessarily in some other form. And I'm not >> counting the bugs, the added complexity to the code, etc. >> Even if it worked perfectly I would not use it. >> >> That some people express desire for it means nothing. Many new users that >> come from other programs, instinctively want things to look as in their old >> favorite program. Except that they won't use the feature either, once they >> realize it's bad. Other people say yes only because it looks shiny, but >> maybe they use the editor 2 minutes a day in average, or just go away the >> day after. Surely it's possible to ignore the desires of such audiences? >> >> I was already disappointed that neovim merged it just to please the >> brainless masses. I hope you don't do the same mistake. With all respect to >> the author of the patch, I understand it's interesting to try to implement >> new things, but this is just a bad idea, IMHO. >> >> Il giorno lunedì 29 agosto 2022 alle 12:24:15 UTC+2 Bram Moolenaar ha >> scritto: >>> >>> >>> It takes a lot of effort to make zero 'cmdheight' work properly. >>> Various bugs and corner cases keep popping up. >>> >>> I added the message window, so that various informative messages do not >>> get lost, and that helps. But it also makes it more complicated. >>> >>> There is also one bug that I don't know how to reproduce yet, which >>> makes the window frames too tall. The last statusline goes missing. >>> >>> So, I was wondering who will actually want to use this? It gives you a >>> line of extra space, at the cost of various side effects. Especially >>> the last status line jumping up when typing ":" or "/". Is this worth >>> the extra work and making the code more complicated? >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Wi n0t trei a h0liday in Sweden thi yer? >>> "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" PYTHON (MONTY) PICTURES LTD >>> >>> /// Bram Moolenaar -- [email protected] -- http://www.Moolenaar.net \\\ >>> /// \\\ >>> \\\ sponsor Vim, vote for features -- http://www.Vim.org/sponsor/ /// >>> \\\ help me help AIDS victims -- http://ICCF-Holland.org /// > > -- > -- > You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. > Do not top-post! 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