[mekoka]

Total refactoring is not a solution.

To Diego: Prove him wrong. I suspect that Bram has been maintaining the code base for so long, that he might need a bit more than a mere message to warm him up to the idea of a refactoring to the scale that you're undertaking. Also, you might not be the first person to contact him with such a proposal. I wonder how long it took for others before they gave up. Build something tangible and contact him again later with proof of concept, something that would make this more than just a fleeting dream.

To people questioning Bram's position: You need to look a bit further than your nose. The fact that you want to create plugins or extensions does not put you in the mainstream as a Vim user. It's an extremely popular editor of almost religious proportion, with lots of existing plugins and extensions. So we know that people use it and making plugins is possible. With all of its annoyances it gets the majority of the job done for most users. One can't just wake up one day and say that they'll change things, not even Bram at this point.

The most desirable outcome in my opinion would be to have Neovim be a continuation of Vim (Vim 10.0?) rather than just another fork, and for that, having Bram on board would be a boon. His longevity as a maintainer is impressive.

[gradstudent]

Good points but I'm not convinced there exists a compelling reason to fork vim. From a user perspective there are no points of differentiation between NeoVim and vim. As an outsider looking in, it appears to me that NeoVim exists only to scratch the itch of some developers writing vim extensions.

Is that reason enough to exist? Maybe. But what's the long-term aim here? Without a strong point of differentiation to attract users and thus developers NeoVim will be left forever playing catchup with Bram's original creation -- constantly rewriting new features to remain relevant and forever fixing both old vim bugs and new NeoVim-specific bugs.

[dasil003]

I'm not qualified to say technically whether I think it's justified or not, but I'd say the reason you're looking for will be the first new graphical version of vim for OS X that is much better than MacVim.

[njharman]

"From a user perspective there are no points of differentiation between NeoVim and vim."

This is shallow and short-sided opinion. If neovim achieves goal of "easier to maintain codebase" then it will have much faster feature development, bug fixing, and extension development. All extremely user facing and exciting.

[gradstudent]

> This is shallow and short-sided opinion. If neovim achieves goal of "easier to maintain codebase" then it will have much faster feature development, bug fixing, and extension development. All extremely user facing and exciting.

I think this is a bit naive. There's no plan of any kind laid out for NeoVim, not even a goal against which progress can be concretely measured. New and compelling features must be well thought-out, well designed and well executed; they don't just fall out of the sky as a consequence of "easier to maintain code".

[weavie]

That will depend on which way the extension developers go after that. If they all flock to neoVim then it will soon be the case that you have to use neoVim in order to use the best extensions.