Neovim already fragmented the community. Bram seems to have stepped up to the challenge bigtime since neovim announcement, as judged by his github activity graph.
I wouldn't say he's stepped up. It's all a reactionary response to Neovim. I dont think we'd ever have async in vim if it weren't for the neovim project.
That being said I hope they pull an io.js and merge taking the best of both vim and neovim, whatever that may be.
you know what? I'm prepared to cut Bram Moolenaar a lot of slack given the goodness he gave us for 20 years through 7 versions of one of my top 3 pieces of useful software.
but move on from what exactly? Vim 8? Looks good to me....
Maybe you want to move on just for the sake of moving on? To a new generation? Can you explain why? Seems to me that the person who knows the code base 200%, who wrote/vetted the entire codebase, is better placed to add features, than newbie refactorers who didn't?
Those newbie refactorers took a 300k line codebase, removed 130k lines of cruft, got it working on a modern toolchain, created an actual OSS dev community without a bus factor of 1, and added two major new features (async and embedded terminal) of which vim has only gotten around to adding 1, while improving performance and laying the groundwork for another major new feature (embeddable) that vim will take years to catch up to.
And all of that while maintaining such good backwards compatibility that almost all vim plugins work unmodified. Plugin authors only need to lift a finger to take advantage of new capabilities like async.
I didn't switch just for the sake of moving on. I switched because by any appreciable aspect, neovim and the developers behind it are simply better than vim.
While this may sometimes be true, it would be dishonest to claim that only the original author of a project should be allowed to maintain it. It's also incorrect, since distributions all maintain forks of vim as well. Given how much time and effort the NeoVim community has put into improving the state of vim (that includes refactoring, as well as much more significant features you ignored like async which NeoVim had first since the maintainer of Vim didn't want async), it is quite disrespectful to call them "newbie refactorers". Everything I've seen of the vim development community makes me feel that it is quite toxic, so I'm very happy with the more open development model that NeoVim has.
neovim will most likely merge good features from vim 8, but I find unlikely that the opposite happens. To be fair, I'm actually okay with that. One of the reasons neovim is where it is right now is because they forked it and because they keep it forked. I'm not sure how fast it would improve if neovim merged back.
Well, at this point in time Amiga and MS DOS should probably go.
They're served decently enough by older versions and I doubt that any machine running those has the resources for features provided by newer Vim versions. Even if they do, the OS support for these features might not be good enough.
If you know how vim-dispatch works, you'll know that it just opens up a split in Tmux/Screen or makes a new tab/window in your terminal emulator to run the command "asynchronously." While it does work, it's definitely a hack and not a feature of Vim.
Right. Frankly that's a disappointing response. One source software shouldn't be a competition. I'm still holding out for some kind of grand unification in the future. I'm sure this is becoming a nightmare for plug-in maintainers, because it's certainly a pain in the ass for users like me.