Is MacVim worth it?

• vimr

  19 6,564 9.5 Swift

  VimR — Neovim GUI for macOS in Swift

I'm not quite sure where the "stable" comment comes from as Vim, NeoVim, and MacVim are all stable projects with active development. MacVim is a macOS GUI for Vim, so the equivalent is VimR for NeoVim (which doesn't maintain official GUI implementations). Otherwise both Vim and NeoVim work natively on macOS as terminal apps.

• macvim

  20 7,444 9.9 Vim Script

  Vim - the text editor - for macOS

  

You can read up on MacVim's docs though no here: https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/blob/master/runtime/doc/gui_mac.txt. Features MacVim support include being bundled as a Mac app, can bind menu items to TouchBar, supports touch pad gestures, drag-and-drop, full-screen support, can launch using a mvim:// protocol (e.g. in iTerm2 you can tell it to launch MacVim when you click on a file path), etc.

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• vim-cocoa

  1 68 0.0 C

  A compact Cocoa port for Vim.

This project was before my time as it's more than a decade old (original page) and the project switched maintainer a few times already (I only became maintainer in 2018). But the basic story is Vim never really got a good gVim implementation for Mac. There was an old implementation for Carbon (now-deprecated API) in Vim but it was quite barebones, and hasn't been working for a while (just for reference you can see this thread which discussed removing the vestigial Carbon-based gVim implementation from the Vim source). Because of that, there were quite a few Vim forks that aimed to bring gVim to the Mac (MacOS 9, Mac OSX Carbon, macOS Cocoa). You can see a decent list of choices in this archived Vim download page. However, most of them were for older versions of macOS, and the closest one to MacVim, vim-cocoa, has not been updated for a while, meaning MacVim is the only actively-maintained gVim implementation for Vim now (not counting NeoVim).

• neovim

  1,384 76,884 10.0 Vim Script

  Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability

  

Yeah that's mostly correct. MacVim isn't based on NeoVim though and is a fork of Vim. But you are right I didn't realize there are actually more NeoVim GUI implementations that I thought on macOS! (https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects) I think there are probably 2-3 active macOS ones that I could see, including Electron-based implementations. I do think with these things usually projects consolidate because unless you are bringing something completely new to the table, eventually it just saves time to only have a couple active projects which is why a lot of the projects there are abandoned.

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