Many of the Vim nerds I know, including myself, have switched over to Neovim. Only when using a remote server with a default installation do I use regular old Vim.
No thanks. I dont care how many golden elephants are in the trunk if I cannot drive it.
If neovim thought that something was broken, it was a very valid reason for a quick change. That’s how changes are made and I think most Vimers respect that. It was a proper community fork, almost a textbook example despite the initial buzz. Everyone got what they needed.
But if you refuse to update, it’s a clear signal for ideological mismatch. The usual issue with picking pace, as I see it through years, is that there’s often no clear finish line where you switch to walking again. The pace just stays like that forever and people start to grow tired of changes they were happy about.
Will that kill Neovim? I don’t think so. People who migrated to it (opposed to newcomers) were built for a change too and will probably “survive” all that. Is your method of dealing with it valid? In principle I agree, nothing wrong with that either.
I've moved away from maintaining my own vimrc, and towards vim distributions, and they all seem to be neovim targeted. First it was LunarVim, and more recently after Lunar stopped being maintained to AstroVim. They have been quite good at batteries included vim, and I'll never go back to vim without LSP.
I really love the Helix editor, and haven't had these issues yet, but it's not intended as a 1-1 vim replacement.
Sure the configuration file is retro compatible, but some of the plugins are better suited for neovim and vice versa. I use a dozen of them and if I switch permanently to neovim I'd like to start fresh using more "modern" alternatives that make use of the newer features.
I ended up moving to Kakoune. The community is small but the tool is so much better designed and integrates well with unix. That means that i can usually glue together whatever I need myself with 1-3 lines of config and don't need an entire plugin when I want something that isn't built-in.
I also have seen that the very first time I tried neovim. Some people may like it but I consider a terminal to be as simple as possible. Furthermore, I use often the CLI on non-GUI terminals where such non-ASCII characters can have various side effects (e.g. unicode bars, braille like progress bar and so on, those destroy your serial terminal line).
I don't think I've seen plugins with animations (nor would I want to). Agreed that emoji in the terminal, modulo useful glyphs like language logos next to files in a directory tree [0], are distracting.
What I don't understand are people who add a million plugins, and then wonder why the startup performance is terrible. I have a fair amount, including some I honestly rarely or never need, and startup time is still 75 msec, which is fast enough for me not to be bothered.
I also think that "stability" and the "community" are two other things that made me switch back to vim.
When I tried it, nvim-qt was hard to associate with file extensions on windows (required something like “-- “filename”” in different shapes and hours of regedit debugging, can’t remember now), then nvim itself had issues with refreshing on manual window resize and with autoresizing the window on setting ‘lines’. And a few more os integration related issues. It was basically unusable gui-wise so I bailed out due to no good reason to stay.
I was probably talking about that astro-thing that works like a christmas tree and was the main selling point at the time.
What does that even mean? Just sounds like a lazy and false argument.
Things may have settled since then, maybe that’s why you think that this phrase looks odd.
I've been using Neovim since it forked and it has always offered a Vim-like experience, it's just that Neovim has given you more options.
Maybe that's why some think it's too "blinky" as it's possible to turn it into a blinky IDE if you really want to because it's more capable (and some do).
It's just in recent years I've migrated to Lua and the large amount of Neovim specific plugins (many that heavily depend on async for non-blocking operation of for instance picking or completion).
I wanted to like neovim for its possibly better lsp integration, but if all I need is an IDE with partial vi emulation, I might as well use VSCode.
i.e if you do :!bash in vim you enter bash in neovim you won't
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42811182
Vim 21.6%
Neovim 12.5%
But honestly at work, I think I am the only one using either a vim or emacs (I kind of use neovim and emacs but primarily neovim). In my childhood there was a TV series called "The last of his class" and it really showed old people (retirement age) doing jobs that will be gone once their retire. While some jobs truly vanished, others just transformed so drastically that they cannot be likened anymore to the job those folks did. Anyway, I feel we are watching changes in developer tooling that will be seen as the end of an era.
* https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Letzte_seines_Standes%3F
Why not make an application you love and leave everyone else alone? The community's behavior - what I see - is a deterrent to using Neovim.
That’s a baseless accusation. I’ve been using Vim for about 25 years, and over the years have contributed small changes to some of the default plugins maintained by third parties (mostly language syntax and `filetype` configuration files). I have yet to even try Neovim but I too noticed that the rate of minor version releases and new features in Vim had increased after the Neovim project got off the ground.
I am happy with bram’s work on vim and with the neovim devs and their work on neovim.
I hope my development projects fail like Moolenaar's! Vim has been extraordinarily successful for decades, possibly the top 5 or 10 FOSS projects ever (?). Citing Vim as an example of development process failure is really incredible.
However, it is also very understandable why vim was forked by the neovim devs, in my view it has been a great success. That doesn't diminish Bram Molenaars achievements and contributions to the world.
The treesitter highlighting in neovim is also better/supports more files out of the box than vim. In vim I was far too used to syntax highlighting being broke halfway through a file for one reason or another (lines too long, syntax new or broken, etc).
I dislike setting up neovim, but I also dislike vim's heavy use of language specific plugins. In a perfect world I'd have lsp+treesitter in vim out of the box and no need to install any plugins.