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by kev6168 4224 days ago
How is forking an open source project disrespectful? For the past eight months I have only seen Neovim folks being very professional, open, and quick to respond to user input. They have been keeping their heads down quietly working on extremely hard problems.

Natively supporting Lua/LuaJIT and Python in writing asynchronous plugins, this alone is worth the wait. I am willing to give them A LOT MORE than 8 months if they can pull just this single feature off.

The request for Python integration has been sitting at the top of Vim's voting list for many years. It must be a very very difficult task, otherwise it could be done years ago. http://www.vim.org/sponsor/vote_results.php/

Other than the new plugin infrastructure, Neovim's GUI and embedding systems will be awesome. Anyway, I applaud people who explore and try to make progress (like from Vi to Vim, a natural process). In the mean time, I am happily using Vim which is both extremely powerful and stable.

TL,DR; I can wait.

2 comments

> For the past eight months I have only seen Neovim folks being very professional, open, and quick to respond to user input.

They've done even more than that. They have gone to great lengths to be helpful. For example, tarruda created an issue on our own issue tracker to let us know they updated their python plugin architecture so that we could fix our Neovim plugin. He didn't have to do this.

https://github.com/Floobits/floobits-neovim/issues/10

tarruda has shown himself to be a very productive engineer and a great steward of a growing Neovim community.

Our experience with Neovim and Vim has been night and day. The reality is that with Neovim you can build plugins that do more than you can with vim, painlessly. I don't really want it to be a vim versus neovim thing, but Bram strikes me as someone who at the very least doesn't understand Neovim's goals. I certainly hope that Neovim's changes are not backported into vim, Neovim is much more open about contributions whereas with vim there's a single gatekeeper with limited time to address big changes.

As someone who has worked Neovim and written Neovim plugins, can you comment on how ready it is for "production" use? Could I switch over to it from Vim now, while using all my old Vimscript plugins? Could I right now use it and write plugins that do work on a separate thread from Vim? Is the msgpack API ready and/or documented? etc.
Before we get another rage post[1] I would like to emphasize that using Neovim requires that you keep up with the changes.

I use it full-time on supported platforms (everything except Windows), but breaking changes will require occasional reconfiguration, recompilation, or remorse.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/2mo54n

>In 8 months, here's what NeoVim has done: 1) Reformatted all the code.

Even if they had done JUST that and the deprecation of old code, it would be MORE than enough.