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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

Say what you want about Neovim, but it sure motivated Bram to make Vim better again. Almost everything listed here looks like a direct reaction to features Neovim has added. Same for older releases (async, terminal, etc.).

Competition is good and I'm glad we're having it.

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Yes, I didn't expect to see popup windows, which seems to a be a direct response to Neovim's floating windows (https://twitter.com/Neovim/status/1101879098044043264).

Just out of curiosity (and this goes into the subject of open source project dynamics of which I am really just a lay observer, and as someone who hasn't followed the history of either projects closely) - how is vim vs neovim organized as open source projects? Do both have a healthy ecosystem of contributor/maintaners? Are either in danger of running into "single person syndrome" or "hit-by-a-bus" syndrome?

Neovim was started pretty explicitly to be a community project. There's a main maintainer but there's no BDFL. Vim has Bram as BDFL.

I'd say that for (Neo)Vim, which is a mature project with a clear design, the BDFL approach is ok but there are risks, illustrated by the half decade where Vim stagnated. Neovim has a less risky approach to project management, I'd say.

Of course, we need to revisit this topic in a decade or so :-)

I thought vim always was a «BDFL project», i.e. run by one person.

Run by one person doesn't mean developed by one person.

reminds me of clang/gcc

ps: I honestly wonder if it's a competition feeling or just a side-induced motivation. Sometimes I look at people online and it revives the desire to do things they do that I couldn't before.

This is more like egcs/gcc. Like egcs, neovim is also a fork motivated by the desire for a new governance model.

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