| With the development beeing rather slow as it is, wouldn't Vim benefit more from improving the whole community aspect as well as connectivity? I still use Vim, but it is a bit annoying to see well done solutions I've been using for years fall behind new projects (Hello Firebug) that accomplish more in a year than others in 20 years. If Sublime Text was Open Source and the vi mode better I'd switch in an instant. And probably a lot of people too. I don't want to sound snobbish and arguing without helping isn't the way to go in the open source community, but man, all that stuff that has been in development for so long, thought of in dusty university rooms, presented in worn 70's summer dresses... It reminds me of the old tailor couple around the corner. They wont go away and probably have a lot of years to life left. A handful of people still value their skill and love to pay more. But it's an old house that hasn't been painted for a long time. You will only find it in the yellow pages and even then you're having trouble to actually find the shop because it's tiny and the house looks like it's soon to be demolished. The machines they use are old and they are the only ones who actually know how to fix them. If they die the shop is gone for good. The same goes trough my head when I look at Vim's homepage, or Molenaars. They look like someone died or moved on to a life without the internet. They don't make the impression that anything of value can be found. But in some places there is, scrambled across different pages by different people of different generations. Modern technology hammered into old shells. A reminder here that scripts can also be found on git. A wiki hosted on wikia there. GUI builds for Mac here, Windows there, none using any new features of the OS. It still runs, but there isn't really any love put into it. If people talk about Vim plugins I only hear how bad VimScript is. If I install one I get it on github, not the script repository because that's where the skeletons lie. The installer I use (and the only one up-to-date) is made by the cream developers. No clue what I'd even do if they stopped producing them. Vim became the double-edge razor a long time ago. It's cheap, it just works and I can pass it down to my kids. All it needs is some learning. But it's only noteworthy because every other kind of razor produced today sucks in one way or another. |
It is somewhat following the linux model (with Linus as the primary developer in the early days).
Just like linux, I believe this has added to the widespread popularity of Vim (ie. it is available by default on most distributions).
Vim doesn't need to "modernize". I would say its availability and ability to still stay relevant is more modern than most other open-source software.