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Comment by oinksoft | Hacker News Reader

Vim scripts are barely even packages! Package managers for operating systems and build dependencies? Certainly. Does everything need package management? Only a small subset of all vim scripts have any dependencies. Tim Pope was the first person I remember introducing a script dependency (tlib) and I thought it was a ridiculous decoration at the time. A good vim plugin should be self-contained, in my opinion.

I recognize that this is really a misgiving I have with the direction Vim is going, towards complexity (plugin managers, multithreaded implementations). NeoVim looks like the final push that makes Vim configuration and operation truly byzantine. Then everybody gets to pick between Emacs and VEmacs.

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You have confused the inability (and frankly unwillingness) in the Vim community to add new features as the virtue of simplicity, while in fact, its the tail wagging the dog. Vim's source is an abomination of global variables, copy paste, and decades of hill climbing. Vim still maintains support for e.g. Amiga and probably a dozen different language bindings. It is Vim's byzantine implementation and not some philosophical purity that guides its development (or really lack thereof). There is nothing simple about it. This mess is NeoVim's raison d'etre.

> towards complexity (plugin managers, multithreaded implementations). NeoVim looks like the final push that makes Vim configuration and operation truly byzantine

There's nothing simple about the Vim source, but Neovim has cut it in half, and modularized it. The Neovim strategy is similar in spirit to a microkernel, or shell tools: let the Vim core operate on inputs, and let external tools (GUIs, plugins) operate on the outputs. Like `find . | grep -v foo | sort` involves three self-contained, well-defined tools.

> multithreaded implementations

Because blocking the UI thread for any kind of I/O network, process, file, whatever is such a great thing. Or even just syntax highlighting, which actually prevents you from being able to move your cursor in vim sometimes.

Vim's source code is an abomination, and Neovim is making it unquestionably better.

Sorry, I can't even feign concern about the state of Vim's source code. I'm a Vim user and plugin developer, not a Vim developer.

A single-threaded UI means I can easily tell what Vim is doing at any time. It means the editor never feels clunky because indexing or some other background activity is hogging resources. It also means I never get a "process is running" prompt like in IntelliJ or Emacs when I want to exit.

> It also means I never get a "process is running" prompt like in IntelliJ or Emacs when I want to exit.

No, instead you find that you can't :q - or type anything for that matter - because everything's frozen while vim is realising that the network drive is down, or you're waiting for the syntax highlighting to finish.

And then you hit control-C and resume editing. None of this is as dramatic as you describe, and syntax-highlight freezes aren't as common now with the improved highlighting algorithm in 7.4.

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