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

formidable task != $10k budget

[Anonymous Coward]

if someone came to me to evaluate their budget reasonableness for something they described as a formidable task taking more than a week or two, and asked for $10k, I'd know they were egregiously underestimating or something is missing.
(and as TFA says: "Over its more than 20 years of life, vim has accumulated about 300k lines of scary C89 code that very few people understand or have the guts to mess with."... that's pretty formidable)

I suppose some ambitious person living in a low cost of living locale could survive for 6 months on 10k, and that would be a fair amount of work time; toiling in their barren garret or tower.

TFA says "$10,000 will allow me to dedicate two months of full time work to this project, which will be enough to implement the following:"

Is $5000/mo a reasonable sum in Recife, Brazil? Probably.

Is 2 months sufficient time to do all he wants to do? I'm not so sure. That's a pretty long list of things he wants to do.

Certainly as a fork... good luck

[inflex]

I admit to being curious to see how this one goes as a fork off the existing vim codebase, but I'm not sure I'd be putting any bets on its long term viability. I suspect an overdose of optimism and insufficient compelling reasons for users to shift from vim will starve this project out.

Good luck to the developer - it's going to be one hell of a learning experience.

Full blown vim in a good IDE:one of my dreams

[rabbin]

Vim has to be one of my favorite programs but I rarely use it for any "ambitious" coding project because it lacks critical features that an IDE provides (the plugins don't cover these gaps either). Right now I'm using Netbeans with the jVi plugin (provides a subset of common vim behavior) for c++ programming and it works well, but if an IDE plugin could simply embed instances of vim into the program itself and have it work seamlessly with the existing IDE features (e.g. advanced code understanding of inheritance hierarchies and type deduction) that would be the ideal. With this in mind, the following from the website sounds really promising:

First class support for embedding

Since Neovim will be provide the interface to interacting with text, any program will be able to tap into this potential and be able to include Neovim commands right in the application.

Re:Never understood the modes

[zippthorne]

Vim isn't about typing. It's about manipulating text. Some of which involves typing and that's why it has insert mode, but a lot of it is about finding your place in a document or moving one block of text from one area to another area, or changing all of something into something else according to a pattern, and you can do all of this without taking your hands off of the keyboard.

Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi? makes a pretty reasonable argument.