Show HN: Veil – A Minimal Neovim GUI for macOS with Metal Rendering

7 points

2 months ago

I built a lightweight Neovim GUI client for macOS. The goal was something simple — just render Neovim in a proper macOS window with multi-window support, like MacVim did for Vim.

Features:

  - Metal GPU-accelerated rendering (falls back to CoreText)
  - Multi-window — each window is an independent Neovim process
  - Neovim's native tabline with Cmd+1-9
  - Full IME support for CJK input
  - Standard macOS shortcuts work out of the box (Cmd+C/V/X/Z/S/W)
  - CLI launcher with gvimdiff support
  - Uses your system-installed Neovim — no bundled binary

The whole thing was built in a single day with Claude Code as a pair programmer. The initial MVP took about 1.5 hours, then another 8-9 hours of iterative refinement to get it to a daily-drivable state. It was an interesting experience — I made all the design decisions and UI judgment calls, while the AI handled the implementation and codebase mechanics.

Still very early (v0.2), plenty of rough edges. Would love feedback from other Neovim users on macOS.