Why Neovim Is Better Than Vim | Hacker News Reader

Why Neovim Is Better Than Vim

geoff.greer.fm

37 pointsggreer4 comments

This is really a rant about the vim community and your experience there, rather than a write-up of why neovim is better than vim.

As an end-user, the only reason you gave me was "some new plugins," and didn't even speak to the power or improvements those plugins make.

Retitle "My Bad Experience with Vim contribution and Bram M."

That said, it was a pretty interesting read.

Good points. A better codebase and community typically mean a better experience for users, but I avoided talking much about concrete benefits because I thought the post was getting rather long. There are a lot of opportunities for improving the responsiveness of plugins. Many currently block the UI in Vim: autocomplete, search, ctrlp-style filename matching, etc. The list of Neovim-only plugins isn't huge yet, but it's only going to grow longer as plugin writers take advantage of Neovim's improved API.

I use a lot of technologies based on criteria that aren't all grounded in features. I do happen to appreciate knowing that I could modify some code for the benefit of many, and without the epic burden of maintaining a fork.

There's also a network effect, in that I'm more likely to use software that I perceive to have a large and qualitatively friendly group of users / developers.

The article might not have addressed specific technological feature benefits, but it certainly articulated some desirable sounding community features. If I hadn't previously moved to the land of emacs, I'd probably be moving to Neovim.

>Patches are often criticized for ridiculous reasons. After we posted our patch to the Vim-dev mailing list, the first reply was:

>>NOTE: Don’t use ANSI style function declarations. A few people still have to use a compiler that doesn’t support it.

>Seriously? C89 is a quarter-century old. The number of people stuck on older compilers can be counted on one hand. This is a non-concern. Still, I acquiesced. It was easier to make the change than argue with the critic.

I laughed in agreement with the author at "Seriously?" I seriously can't imagine who uses a compiler almost as old as I am. But then I started thinking:

I respect OpenBSD, C compilers, Vim for supporting many platforms for a long time; that's a programming task I've never approached. I use Ruby in my business, and don't care about supporting anything but Heroku!

So: what's it like contributing to Vim or OpenBSD, which has a neato-torpedo list of esoteric supported platforms[0]? Who are the esoteric users, what do they do, and how do they do it? It'd help me empathize, and not dismiss off-hand their complaints.

[0] http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html

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