Our great sponsors
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
I'm shocked. I've been a vim user my whole life. I use neovim lately, but I didn't eve know Bram was dead. I've never interacted with him personally, but I've interacted with the tool he wrote and the documentation he wrote almost on a daily basis. Vim is part of me.
I know the project will likely continue, but I can't help but thinking: what now?
It brings up this issue of death in software for me. Software is getting old enough now that it is starting to outlive its authors. RIP Anthony Grimes and Ian Murdock. I have used both of these men's software after their demise[1][2], and I am grateful for it.
However, it does make me think. Grimes' software continues to have issues filed against it[3] by folks unaware that no one is getting notifications for them. On the other hand, Debian was popular enough to continue after Ian's passing, and continues to gain momentum.
I know it might be too soon for me to wonder about these questions to an audience. These were the giants on whose shoulders we continue to work today. I'm glad their code persists.
1: https://github.com/Raynes/fs
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock
3: https://github.com/Raynes/fs/pulls
> Disclaimer: I'm not even user of either of (Neo)vim or Emacs. As soon as I read "programmable", I'm off. I just prefer fixed-function editor that suits my taste , a few minutes of configuration & go. But that's just me, what do I know?
Then Helix may be for you! It uses the Kakoune keybinds, which make SO MUCH SENSE compared to Vim or Emacs. And it's already pre configured and includes a lot of useful features. I have been daily driving it and it's pretty fast and good. Since it automatically uses LSPs if they are in the PATH, it requires very minimal configuration, my configuration only includes theme and some stylistic changes, you can take a look at it if you'd like: https://github.com/RGBCube/NixOSConfiguration/blob/master/ma...
You are stating these things as though they were established facts. But they seem to be opinions. Or do you have data to back them up?
> People who are new to vim-style-editors and go to neovim are mainly people who would have gone to vim if neovim didn't exist.
It seems reasonable to assume that a lot of new people would not pick up either Vim or Neovim without LSP integration and Tree-sitter.
Vim has adopted a lot of the early features of Neovim and now Vim9 also has virtual text for rendering LSP diagnostics in the buffer[1] and there is a Vim9 LSP plugin too. But it does not at all seem likely that Vim would have these things were it not for the push from Neovim.
Besides, it looks like Vim still does not have mature support for Tree-sitter.[2]
> Well, the prevalent wisdom of 30+ years of FOSS has been that they're mostly bad.
There are many famous forks from the past 30 years that hardly anybody calls bad. Some examples: Net/Free/OpenBSD, GNU/XEmacs, Open/LibreSSL. These projects allowed people with different goals or values to carry on in their own directions, while also motivating each other to pick up development pace. They have often also shared code with each other.
[1] Which looks like this: https://sr.ht/%7Ewhynothugo/lsp_lines.nvim/
[2] One experimental plugin I came across: https://github.com/mattn/vim-treesitter