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Comment by jmcdiesel | Hacker News Reader

The numbers tend to disagree with you. Unless you think that only hacker news users are on git... Given VIM is bundled with OSes, i would never expect neovim to take it place in usage numbers (unless OSes start adopting neovim as well)... but when it comes to actual interest, in just about every measurable aspect, neovim is coming out on top of developers who actually know about it.

Most devs I work with use it (if they use vim at all), I've seen it more than VIM lately at conferences as well. You give up nothing using it an gain a bit (and will gain much more as its further developed)

[removed reflexive jab at poster]

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You just sound like a grumpy old man set in his ways, honestly.

No matter the discussion or behavior of other commenters—even if it's about editors!—it's never okay to be uncivil. This type of comment is uncalled for. The rest of your comment stands very well without it.

I don't consider people who use throw away accounts to spout crap and hide in cowardice to be real commenters... their feelings an opinions are worth the value of the throw away account they created to spout them.

That does not matter. Each of us on HN has a responsibility to treat each other with respect and civility. If you find you can't do that in a particular circumstance, refrain from commenting at all. Expressed another way, don't feed the trolls. Flag if you feel appropriate, and move on.

You're right, I'm being stubborn and reactive.

I removed the offensive part.

Vim hasn't been on GitHub as long as Neovim. Check out the mailing list, Reddit, basically anywhere but HN or GitHub. Neovim is a drop in the bucket. And since Vim has taken all the best features from Neovim (in less time -- Neovim hasn't released version 1 despite being crowd-funded for several years) this is really a Node-and-io.js situation. Vim is going to absorb Neovim.

I'm highly doubtful that Vim will absorb Neovim. You say "Vim has taken all the best features from Neovim" but that's not true at all.

There where two major features shipped with Vim 8, which, as taken from the article:

- Official support for packages

- Asynchronous APIs for packages

Neovim does have those, and has for some time. However, things that Neovim has that Vim does not have, and probably will not have for some time:

- Neovim doesn't require plugins to be written in Vimscript, they may instead be written in Lua

- Neovim exposes pretty much all it's API via MessagePack, so you can remotely control Neovim in an entirely language agnostic way

- A built in terminal emulator, letting you stay within Vim even when you need to do some shell business

- A host of other quality of life improvements that make Neovim a more consistent, quick, and better organized software[0]

[0] - https://github.com/neovim/neovim#whats-been-done-so-far

Point taken in some cases, but a lot of those are misfeatures. The Lua API is not yet usable because they built a terminal emulator instead. If Vim had a terminal emulator, one would expect Neovim to remove that bloat. Not all Neovim additions are good ones.

"Vim hasn't been on GitHub as long as Neovim." -- which says a lot, considering its age... it speaks to one of the core problems, Bram's godlike grip over VIM.

On top of that, he only started to introduce these features AFTER neovim came and put the pressure on by doing it better... if neovim's approach wasn't better, why would he be implementing features he's previous said he wouldn't implement?

A lot of people (including me) would consider an ecosystem off of GitHub to be a good thing.

Why is that?

You would have to ask Linus about that :)

For one, I don't use GitHub.

It also wouldn't occur to me to go to Github to star vim (I will now) - it's so de facto, it's not like Github is where I go to get it.

I have to assume you're either trolling or actually involved in the Neo vim project or something like that. Because there's no universe in which GitHub stars are an appropriate measure of popularity or interest.

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