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> Vim has not, to the best of my knowledge, copied any features back from neovim

vimscript9, terminal, async among others. NeoVim was a kick in the pants for Bram to pull Vim into modernity.




This characterization is false on all counts.

Neovim provided Bram competition, but he has not copied those features from Neovim.

vimscript9 doesn’t look or act like Lua (it still acts like a first-class citizen, unlike Lua) even though it is definitely improved over the previous version.

There have been terminal scripts for a while, but adding virtual terminal support was something resisted because a lot of people ran vim in a tty or with tmux. (Strictly speaking, terminal support is only something that to me makes sense for gvim and the like, otherwise you’re getting into terminal emulators all the way down. So much for the neovim philosophy of ripping unnecessary things out.)

And async was the entire reason that Neovim hard forked from Vim. Bram did not like the patches and asked for changes. The Neovim developers didn’t like the changes, so they hard forked. Bram implemented the async features / API surface that he wanted shortly thereafter.

There is a constant push from the Neovim camp that Vim is stagnant, backwards, dead, etc. None of this is true, and the messaging should absolutely stop. Frankly, I’d be happier if they rebranded from Neovim, because IMO they’re not vim and have stopped caring about compatibility with vim.


> There is a constant push from the Neovim camp that Vim is stagnant, backwards, dead, etc. None of this is true, and the messaging should absolutely stop. Frankly, I’d be happier if they rebranded from Neovim, because IMO they’re not vim and have stopped caring about compatibility with vim.

I have happily used (Brams) Vim the majority of my career; some daliances into PyCharm or VSCode here and there.Prior to the NeoVim fork; Vim felt.. slow.. to adopt new features. I was OK with that generally. 5 years for Vim7 to come out was the biggest gap, before Vim8 released after a decade gap (with NeoVim getting forked ~halfway through). Each major release taking longer than the previous. You can say Vim development hadn't slowed; but major releases did; with a ten year gap was concerning.

I don't say that as a negative on Bram, but 10 years between major releases is an eternity in the modern programming world - I'm glad he's refocused, Vim-9 is a huge leap forward.


>Strictly speaking, terminal support is only something that to me makes sense for gvim and the like, otherwise you’re getting into terminal emulators all the way down.

Terminal is what allows plugins such as fzf.vim to work, I think it's amazing.

I only welcome the competition between vim and neovim, I think it's been a great improvement to the ecosystem.


Competition is fine. The neovim project and supporters shading the truth on its background, motivations, etc. is not.




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