Neovim: Rebuilding Vim For the 21st Century 248
An anonymous reader writes "Neovim is a major overhaul of the vim editor to provide better scripting, cleaner support for plugins and integration with modern graphical interfaces. Modernising the large and complex codebase of Vim is a formidable task, but the developer has a clear plan, and has already begun work. There's a Bountysource fundraiser running to support the effort. If Vim is your editor of choice, check it out." (The crowd-funding effort has only one more day to go, but has well exceeded already the initial goal of $10,000.)
Re:Never understood the modes (Score:4, Insightful)
Vim is nice and I actually use it for programming, but jumping between the command mode, insert mode and visual mode still slows me down a lot. Why can't we just be in insert mode constantly and use Ctrl+something for all the commands? Also use Shift+arrows to select text?
Re:Vim's Bram Moolenaar on 'Neovim' (Score:5, Insightful)
The root problem here that tarruda is addressing (and he's very explicit about this in the neovim newsgroup) is that the code needs to be refactored for maintainability and to open up the development process. There's one guy in the world who really understands the codebase, so we're all one sleepy bus driver or bursting blood vessel away from vim becoming a frozen pile of code. Tarruda's starting point is refactoring out huge swathes of platform specific code, to be replaced with a single dependency on libuv for cross-platform support, to get to full test coverage, to modernize the C, and to craft a multi-developer process that allows for modern ongoing development by a large number of people, like other OSS projects have.
All the user focussed gains that will flow from that are real gains, but really what Tarruda is doing is freeing Moolenaar from the corner into which he's painted himself. I like to think that Moolenaar (like Stallman with JWZ's fork of emacs) will come around, see the real improvement in the fork, and arrange to cut over to it.