Has Bram Moolenaar ever publicly acknowledged the influence of Neovim on Vim 8? At the very least, Neovim provided the market research to show that async was worth doing.
Threads here imply that NeoVim has a lot more traction and capabilities than Vim, yet it might as well not exist for all that we don't hear about it.
> that'll be the end of old Vim
To be frank, no, it won't. Not so long as Vim is installed by default, and holds the name Vim. NeoVim can't even simply replace Vim as the default, since it works differently (the changed configuration path, for one), and no longer works on all of the platforms that operating systems are installed upon (even if intentionally).
Vim just works. Until that is no longer the case, NeoVim will have a hard time gaining traction outside of those who are already waving its flag.
That said, I appreciate NeoVim - if for nothing else - for prompting Bram to realize there are more usecases. But I would argue that its time has passed, as bright as that time was.
It should be said that people who use Neovim often use the word Vim to keep it understandable and not seem annoying.
Something about this comment (perhaps the above quote) makes me think that perhaps neovim will be to vim, what vim is to vi...
Not suggesting one way is better or worse, but I think it's interesting.
The main advantage on the other hand is that my friend stopped bothering me about having to switch to neovim, which I guess is a non-issue for most. Now he's trying to get me on to zsh.
$ git clone <<repository_url>> $HOME/config
$ ln -sf $HOME/config/vim/vimrc $HOME/.vimrcI would guess neovim isn't even on the radar of most vim users. I don't see neovim surpassing vim any time soon, personally.
I love neovim, but the idea that "most people use nvim" or "vim is dying" is just wrong. Though I really do think nvim's development philosophy will lead to better results than Moolenaar's.
EDIT: For the sake of being equal-opportunity, you can do the same thing in emacs with make-comint, even down to having it as an operator if you're using evil-mode. Y'know, whatever you're into.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/Wibjarm/5ae4c4da57bd034d15123cd8edad...
I think Neovim also has a pluggable engine, so IDE vim emulators can simply include that portion rather than implementing the functionality per platform.
Edit: Forgot to mention, many of the improvements in vim 8 were clearly in reaction to Neovim's innovations. Both projects benefit from the other, this isn't a fight to the death.
Neovim's embedded terminal also works great and is something vim doesn't have.
Neovim is simple to try out because it's a drop-in replacement--all your old plugins will likely work out of the box, along with your .vimrc.
There are numerous improvements and features but I'll not talk about them. It has the momentum. Hundreds of developers are contributing to it. That should be the biggest reason to switch as it directly means Neovim will be much healthier than Vim which lacks the momentum.
If you want to know more about what exactly Neovim is doing on the technical side, I suggest you read up the 7 newsletters [0] since the inception of Neovim.
I'm not arguing that there are no good reasons to try Neovim. I just don't see any logic in your argument. You speak about loosely defined "health" and "momentum" as if there was a clear link between software quality and amount of buzz around the project.
It's not like Neovim (or any open source project) is an open house where anyone can come, throw some code over the wall and get it merged. Like any big project (Vim included), it is being maintained by a set of core responsible developers who know better. Neovim has a huge focus on automated tests and CI also. I don't see any reason why a big contributor base should make the end product worse.
> I just don't see any logic in your argument. You speak about loosely defined "health" and "momentum" as if there was a clear link between software quality and amount of buzz around the project.
Of course there is. Look at Linux, ReactJS, Docker, Kubernetes, Ubuntu, Firefox. The more momentum a project has, the more contributions it gets. Open source projects succeed because of the community around them.
GNU Hurd was not able to gather momentum and look where it is today. Contributors flocked to Linux so it flourished.
that's not disputed. the question is, what specific impacts do these contributions have on me, the user? why should i, a user of vim, switch to neovim?
It feels faster to me, but I haven't compared to vim 8. I don't use any plugins doing work in the background, so that's not the difference here.
Would vim 8 have async if neovim did not exist? No, because it was fine without it.
Point is I use all three all the time, and I fully expect to continue doing that until world hunger or me ends.
"I am super surprised that everybody talks about Vim 8 but almost nobody mentions that...
- Bram Moolenaar did the last major version ten years ago
- The recent years of Vim's development were almost stalling
- Bram publicly questioned the Neovim team's efforts creating a fork and bringing new essential stuff like async to Vim—he even made kind of fun of them
After Neovim came out and has been developed at fast pace, Bram surprisingly presents Vim 8 with the stuff we wanted which before he decided against—all the stuff Neovim did and of course incompatible to the fork.
Bram's decision on being incompatible should be challenged and discussed, would love to hear his thoughts. Since no money is involved, his decision feels even more awkward, why not welcome competition or potential contributors, being a team player, work together or merge? Or is it Bram's injured pride, the fear of getting irrelevant with some piece of ancient software?
Whatever 'meaningful reasons' Bram chose not to support a fork, now we are left with incompatible Vim variants which damage the entire Vim ecosystem. I guess that most distributions will package Vim 8 with their distributions, just because not everybody has followed all the happenings, and Vim 8 sounds like a solid choice, like going with the mainstream. So, Vim 8 might get the next standard and an awesome fork could die which I find sad. The Neovim team has been disrupting, they went ahead and it's a community developed software which is a huge differentiator to Bram's work and codebase of controversial quality.
What are your thoughts? Should we support both versions and should we write plugins for both or focus on one? Or is competition good and the Neovim team will deliver more and prove that still a community developed Neovim will outperform Vim in the long run?
Don't get me wrong, this isn't a rant, Bram created with Vim an fantastic piece of software—this is about the question how we should keep competition which helps the entire ecosystem so we don't end up with a dying fork and original Vim's development slowing down again for the next ten years. One idea is that all distributions should either still package old Vim 7.x only to let people decide themselves or always package both Vim 8 and Neovim together. But how should we get there?"
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/52q4ul/about_vim_8_and...
Doing so might make Bram the 'better person', but I wouldn't blame him if it makes him a bit resentful.
No, the core contributors have not been outright in their criticisms, but IMO the fork itself shows a lack of respect for Bran's work and a lack of willingness to work with him to make Vim better. And now tarruda has stepped back from NeoVim, perhaps recognizing himself the cost that Bram bears.
By simply contributing to the tests - one of the outright critiques of Vim itself - they could have brought a lot more confidence to accepting such patches to Vim, but they chose to take their ball and play elsewhere instead.
What frustrates me the most is that instead of two branches of Vim that are moderately better (with the future of one of the branches being left behind), we could have had one which was much better.
vim's source code is really hard to test. Refactoring is needed to make code testable. That's true for every project that doesn't have tests yet. Another thing that makes it really hard to contribute to vim is that it supports operating systems that don't even exist anymore. I really don't feel like spinning a VM to make sure my changes don't break it on MS-DOS. I would rather send a PR that removes MS-DOS support than support that.
vim7 was a great improvement, and when I show people the time travel capabilities it blows their minds. But that was a long time ago. With the number of people to whom vim is very important, I'm surprised there isn't more results coming out of it.
Though maybe it is mostly that the core doesn't need to change and innovation can happen in the plugins? That is certainly true to some extent, but the async stuff was way overdue.
Regarding cost. Most developers need to be paid. I read [here](https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/vimannounce/conversation...) that Google provided (some) funding to Bram. With neovim initially there were lots of new things (clean-up, async, terminal), I don't see a problem if there should be a bit of slowdown now. It's a team. I think it's robust. I prefer Neovim and occasionally use MacVim too, thus grateful to Bram also. No need for frustration imho (but I'm glad there is neovim:)