Ask HN: Is Vim Dead? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Vim Dead?

10 pointsllmblockchain18 comments

It seems like most new-ish plugins only support NeoVim and Vim has been left behind. Also, Bram passed away not that long ago... it seems like Vim will fall further behind.

Is everyone moving to NeoVim?

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I find this type of question a little funny. What do you mean by “dead” and who’s “everyone”?

Vim will likely be alive for decades to come for sysadmins editing files in /etc over ssh.

It might be “dead” for the new languages with a small community and nobody interested in adding support for vim…

So, it might be dead for some people and not for others.

At the end of the day I usually pick an editor that the language I’m gonna be writing has good support for.

Sublime for C, vscode for JS/TS, and jetbrains for golang

There have been six releases of Vim _this week_. So, no, Vim is not "dead".

https://github.com/vim/vim/tags

That's a lot of releases for a dead software. I had 5 bug fixes releases for a software that is in pre beta release stage ;)

Vim is a piece of computer software and was never alive to begin with.

This is the only reason answer right here.

I sure hope mainline Vim isn't dead. I keep trying NeoVim but I prefer using Vim in a GUI and no NeoVim GUI I've found has the level of polish that MacVim [1] has. VimR [2] comes close but keep finding myself going back to MacVim.

[1] https://macvim.org/ [2] https://github.com/qvacua/vimr

For modifying text or configs on a remote machine? No. I'm still using vim for those tasks until neovim somehow becomes standard on servers.

I've never really used it for any kind of serious programming as trying to twist a modal text editor into an IDE by propping it up with all sorts of plugins cost me so much time that I just abandoned that thought.

I just use the usual IDEs for their respective languages (pycharm for python, intellij for Java, visual studio for C#/dotnet, etc).

However, I am giving the helix editor a go for programming since I still like vim movements and while helix has their own set of movement keys, it's pretty nice. It also has LSP built-in but I found it way easier to setup for programming than vim/nvim.

I still just use regular vim/gvim all day long. Haven't looked at neovim. I bet as long as distro maintainers keep the original alive, it will stick around.

Only once the distros ship nvim as the default vi/vim

As long as Vim is installed on systems by default it will keep being used for quick edits. NeoVim is popular but by a different group: people who use Vim as their main editor and want to customize it.

NeoVim will probably outlast Vim but that day is not in the foreseeable future imho.

It's so dead that I edit Java files with it and only switch to eclipse when I need to build.

Probably. NeoVim started off as a peaceful project: “Hey Bram, mind if we refactor the code a little bit to make it more maintainable, and add async to the slow things?”

And Bram fervently rejected that, so Vim was forked. At this point, why would anyone want to maintain Vim?

I don't think that's the issue. Vim has been maintained for years, even after NeoVim popped on the scene. The main contention point these days seems to be Vim's choice of vimscript 9 instead of Lua as chosen by NeoVim. Now there's a divide in the plugin community.

I just hope that if vim dies, neovim will finally provide a way to use ^W with terminal windows. It's the main thing that keeps me from switching.

nVim has interesting ideas, but it doesn't yet have the level of stability that I require in my daily driver text editor. I have colleagues that heavily use nVim and note that it crashes occasionally. While you can make pretty much anything crash, there's a watermark of bullet-resistance I expect, as it were.

Also... Why is this post flagged? Did someone merely dislike the title? it's a decent question IMO.

According to the internet, everything's dead. Until it isn't ...

Lazyvim was my catalyst to move over

That's a lot of FUD. Look at the commit log of vim. As alive as ever. Capable hands took over when Bram passed away.

I'm sticking with vim, neovim doesn't offer anything of value to me since I don't want to use Lua, treesitter or lsp, and it takes away things I appreciate (gvim, stability).

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