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Comment by patrickdavey | Hacker News Reader

I was slightly surprised that they didn't add a mention of neovim.

It’s mentioned in the “last 20 years” graph near the bottom. The article largely focuses on how Vim came to be, long before Neovim.

while neovim is great and I intend to switch even, some time down the road, it caused a not-really-compatible fork and diverted the efforts, I wish them to be merged however hard it will be.

I am maybe just a year or so down from the switch from vim to neovim, but lua is a game changer. It's like, it's easy to configure stuff yourself now. Better plugins are written because the tools are better, or at least so I'm convinced.

I will make a random comparison to latex vs typst (typesetting software). Both incorporate a programming environment, you can write a program right in your document. The difference is that the tex programming environment is a bit unapproachable and not very similar to other languages you may already know, while typst's equivalent is consistent and more similar to languages you know.

Vim9script is actually a great language.

Well, I missed it because I seem to have departed Vim

Ohhhh I misread, I thought you were saying you were a year away from switching, lol.

> ... lua is a game changer...

Am I the only one who absolutely hates Lua? Its syntax, the fact that variables are global by default unless you local them, `foo = nil` isn't variable assignment but instead variable unassignment!, etc.

There are far better scripting languages than Lua.

well, you could warm up to it by using vimscript first

vim9script is much more approachable while still being native to Vim's internals and idea of text editing. I don't know about using it for things like LSPs though, perhaps an expert could chime in.

You are absolutely not. In point of fact pretty much everyone hates Lua except the handful of folks integrating it. It has a huge lead in terms of embeddability and performance vs. competitors like Python. So you see it show up in little C applications[1] again and again and again because everything else is just too much of a hassle.

But everyone agrees the programming experience in the language is awful.

[1] My son just got into RC planes, so of course I found myself looking at ExpressLRS radios and pulling EdgeTX from GitHub. It's an otherwise straightforward ESP32 board, and there in the app... yup, Lua everywhere.

> But everyone agrees the programming experience in the language is awful.

Simply not true. The power to weight ratio of Lua is amazing. You can keep the entire language in your head easily, and even without LuaJIT it’s crazy fast. It’s great for creating DSLs. As a configuration language it is excellent- in fact that’s how Lua originally came to exist.

DSLs and configuration languages aren't "programming experience" though. (Also that's oversold, you should be on a lisp if that's the design goal, Lua is a distant second.)

I stand by what I said. Lua sucks for coding. The only people who like it are ones who haven't mastered one of the "real" environments.

It's true that Lua is very rough in many places.

But it's still ten times better than Vimscript.

I've been playing with Rust a lot in the last few weeks, and I have been pretty happy with the Rust plugins available for NeoVim. It gives me most of the features I would want from a "real" IDE, but of course it's still Vim, so all my configs and other plugins still work.

I'm convinced that the reason it's so good is because Lua is simply a better language than VimScript, making it easier to make plugins.

If you follow any discussions around development, it seems the chance of this happening is essentially zero. I feel that they will continue to diverge into completely different editors.

What do you predict the pros/cons of Vim vs Neovim will be?

Hard to say, but as it stands, but my view is that that the typical nvim users want Vim as a full-fledged IDE with little effort whereas Vim users still want Vim largely as a text editor. And of course there are already a whole bunch of incompatible differences between them that would only be noticed by the more "power" users I suppose.

And vis editor, that also has herietage from sam.

vis rocks!

https://github.com/martanne/vis

I actually use vis daily, alongside NeoVim - for opening very large files.

Most editors choke at couple MB, Vis can open 10 Gigabyte text files with zero delay.

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