[roryokane]

Vim does not support graphical user elements, and is built around the unfamiliar language Vimscript. Those drawbacks are pretty baked into Vim and would be hard to change (though someone is trying to: https://www.bountysource.com/fundraisers/539-neovim-first-it...). Many other editors don’t have these drawbacks, allowing them to support features such as these:

• a graphical file tree browser (with icons, not restricted to ASCII art like NERDTree)

• proportional-width fonts

• a zoomed-out-code mini-map scroll bar

• Plugins written in more mainstream, cleaner languages than Vimscript. Vim does have a plugin interface for some other languages such as Python, but some OSs’ provided Vim installations don’t support those languages, and it’s hard to get a version of Vim with support.

[comex]

It's also apparently a pain to integrate into anything else...

http://www.freehackers.org/VimIntegration

...and plugins can't update things in the background...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/-4pqDJfHCsM%...

etc. I haven't looked at the code myself, but it sounds like a rewrite or major refactor would be very useful.

[aktau]

It's happening as we speak (since a few days, based on the crowdfunding campaign). It seems like there's quite a bit of people (volunteers and would-be volunteers) participating already. Voting about the preferred voting style is about to end:

https://github.com/neovim/neovim

[folago]

Yeah but this is happening https://github.com/neovim/neovim. And the potential for all you asked for is there, see the long term plan https://www.bountysource.com/fundraisers/539-neovim-first-it....