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by gorjusborg 1047 days ago
> You should ask, and answer, the question in reverse. What does neovim offer me, as a regular vim user?

Well, one of the goals of neovim was to make it easier for new people to contribute.

So, there's an obvious feature you might be overlooking: the project surviving past its creators passing.

Beyond that, async, lua, lsp and treesitter support are other things neovim brings to the table. I don't use vim much anymore, but I know that neovim incorporated them first. If vim did follow on some of those innovations, consider how long it might take for new vim maintainers to get to a point where Bram needed to be to keep up, without his guidance.

I wonder if there is a need for both vim and neovim in the future. Neovim was born out of wanting to do similar things to what the vim maintainers are considering.

1 comments

I know you listed Lua already, but it's important to stress that. Bram _did not_ want Lua as the main scripting language, and created Vim9 Script as a "better VimScript" instead. That's a stark difference in the direction for the project, and it signals to me that Vim is not meant to reintegrate with Neovim. It's no longer a question of Vim catching up with Neovim.

However, this was Bram's vision. We don't know how the new leadership will affect that.

> Vim9 Script as a "better VimScript" instead. That's a stark difference in the direction for the project

Great point. I wasn't following vim much, so didn't know the context around the language changes.

That does seem like a core philosophical difference. I'm interested to see what the future holds.

it's not quite just a "better vimscript" language it's an incompatible language, if it was just improvement on top of the existing vimscript it would have been fine i think but what people are complaining about is if you are going to break compatibility why not choose an existing language like lua
Yes, you're right. That's what I meant, but I should've highlighted the incompatibility aspect.