[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.