Neovim: Rebuilding Vim For the 21st Century

An anonymous reader writes "Neovim is a major overhaul of the vim editor to provide better scripting, cleaner support for plugins and integration with modern graphical interfaces. Modernising the large and complex codebase of Vim is a formidable task, but the developer has a clear plan, and has already begun work. There's a Bountysource fundraiser running to support the effort. If Vim is your editor of choice, check it out." (The crowd-funding effort has only one more day to go, but has well exceeded already the initial goal of $10,000.)

Comments

Vim's Bram Moolenaar on 'Neovim'

[RDW]

https://groups.google.com/foru...

"It's going to be an awful lot of work, with the result that not all systems will be supported, new bugs introduced and what's the gain for the end user exactly?

Total refactoring is not a solution. It's much better to improve what we have. Perhaps with some small refactorings specifically aimed at making Vim work better for users."

Re:Vim's Bram Moolenaar on 'Neovim'

[jjohnson]

what's the gain for the end user exactly?

The origin of the fork is that tarunna submitted two large patches to vim that would have fixed a lot of process management in vim, and was rejected because the current vim codebase is so large and crufty that it's impossible to make major architectural changes to it, like allowing for async process management, just because the risk is too high (especially when there's literally one person, Moolenaar, with a commit bit and thus accepting responsility for every change). And the risk really is very high, I'm not faulting Moolenaar for this.

The gain is that (neo)vim will be able to keep up with current technologies in its plugins (like non-blocking operations), it'll allow plugin authors to write faster plugins by speeding up the plugin architecture, existing plugins will see a speed increase, and other programs will be able to embed vim as an editor rather than hacky "vim keybindings" plugins. Given time and asm.js, it'll run natively within a web browser. None of these were in reach with Moolenaar squatting on the code rejecting risky patches. Sounds like a lot of gains to me.

Re:There's a reason people argue about vim and ema

[EvolutionInAction]

It's pretty obvious that you've never had to debug deployed embedded systems. This isn't ancient history buddy, it's something I have to do regularly. Certain fields have requirements that just aren't going to go away.

Re:There's a reason people argue about vim and ema

[Waffle Iron]

I tried your scenario.

If play your boss and I exit with ':q', no problem. Your version is still there.
If I exit with ':wq', vim says: "E45: 'readonly' option is set (add ! to override)"
If I exit with ':wq!', vim says: "WARNING: The file has been changed since reading it!!!
Do you really want to write to it (y/n)?"

So I conclude that one of the following is likely the case:
a) your boss is was an idiot who would ignore a message ending with three exclamation points
b) you boss installed a bizarre custom vim config file that somehow allowed silent overwrites of modified files from readonly mode
c) your story is a fabricated troll