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> Something I really like about vim is that it stuck closer to the unix philosophy of doing one thing well

You mean relative to Emacs. Because otherwise that belief makes no sense. It's an urban legend that was used as an excuse for Vim's limitations, it has no basis in reality. Zero.

Nor does the "do one thing" slogan match Bram's own goals for the project. Again, it was a rumor passed along and repeated without verification, just like the rumor that Vim supported DOS, OS/2, etc., even though no one had checked whether that was actually true.

Vim has its own blowfish implementation, an internal spellchecker, an 11k LOC plugin called netrw which doesn't follow Vim's own interface conventions. Vim also now has the "LogiPat" plugin which adds yet another way to build regular expressions, hiding Vim's own regex flavor. Vim has builtin NetBeans integration, Sun workshop integration.

> and being highly compatible with the rest of the OS environment for more features through the universal interface of text.

You mean because it pipes stdio streams?

> You mean because it pipes stdio streams?

Yes, I was referring to :[range]!, :[range]w !, and :[range]r !.

And yes, I guess I meant relative to Emacs. I see it as the main design dichotomy between them.

However, while vim does have built-in features that go against this ideal, they are extraneous features, not a core part of vim. I guess my post was a rant against adding yet another one of those kinds of features that lead it to be used in a way that departs from the unix philosophy even more.

There's nothing "wrong" with all those things you mentioned. I use tmux literally all the time. I'll likely never use this built in terminal, but I know plenty of people that love this future in neovim. Everybody has different workflow preferences.

As a user of GNU screen, I feel pretty much the same way about this new feature. I feel When developing a new script (Bash, Python, etc.), I often just run something like `w | !python3 %` in command-line mode. I could be wrong (probably am) but I got the impression that the primary motivation for adding this feature was to play catch-up with NeoVim – similar to how asynchronous I/O support was one of the main new features included with Vim 8.

As a sysadmin, I’m not particularly attracted to the “shiny” stuff so I find it interesting to see the directions that the large developer user-base is influencing Vim towards. Also, as a donor to the ICCF, I can vote on new features, so I should probably take a look at the possible options and vote on something that’s more relevant to my own use of Vim.

If I don't want flair, I use vi. Otherwise I want more optional features that I can use to potentially improve my workflows. Context switches between vim hotkeys and tmux hotkeys involve some mental energy I could be using somewhere else.

I really don't know the best way to get a 4 pane setup (like a cross +) without having a :terminal in slot 1-4.

I like this workflow sometimes.

I'm working on a bash script and yeah I :!bash % a lot, but sometimes I want a REPL too, with visible history

For those wanting to build this, here's how I do it on Ubuntu: https://github.com/shmup/vimmies/wiki/Installing-vim8