What's the use case for a separate GUI for neovim? I remember using macvim for a few days maybe 8 years ago, but I never "got it". It felt like the benefits of having my editor in my terminal were thrown out for little return.
If neovim had a proper gui, you could move away from some of the limitations of the terminal. The biggest being using fixed width characters for drawing UI elements.
Emacs does it pretty well, one of the few things that makes me jealous of emacs as a vim user.
IIUC fixed widths is more than just a UI problem. Lots of internal code is assuming that. But maybe it works well-enough that it isn't a real issue.
I remember trying a terminal that didn't have fixed char widths and it mostly worked. The only real issue was line wrapping (as vim and the terminal would both wrap based on how long they considered the line to be). So maybe it would be possible! I would love to see solid support for variable-width fonts.
I know variable-width fonts are controversial, but I actually think they work well for coding but haven't had the chance to use them much due to Vim limitations. But especially for Markdown and similar mostly-text content they seem like a clear win.
And input limitations can be resolved by non-terminal UIs (for example like Ctrl+i and Tab being mapped to the same control character in old terminals - that one is solved by newer protocols, but the problems don't end there.)
Neovim already supports these keys as long as you are using a terminal that supports the Kitty keyboard protocol (Kitty, wezterm, alacritty, foot, ghostty)
Seems more likely to be something you implement with e.g. kitty/iterm/sixel escape codes than moving to a GUI app. Actually probably is something that could be implemented in neovim today. Maybe even by a plugin, not sure what control they have over stuff like that.
I've been using neovide for a few months now, and my biggest gripe is that there's not an easy way to automagically open a new file in an existing neovide window as a tab. With macvim I could do `--remote-tab-silent` and it was handled, but neovide seems to want me to use some kind of background server and a bunch of other hoops to jump through.
that would be nice, currently neovide works pretty well for me. I've heard some who like VimR a lot as well but it's a bit cluttered for me, I just want a fast minimal GUI