
Why Neovim Is Better Than Vim - ggreer
http://geoff.greer.fm/2015/01/15/why-neovim-is-better-than-vim/
======
mod
This is really a rant about the vim community and your experience there,
rather than a write-up of why neovim is better than vim.

As an end-user, the only reason you gave me was "some new plugins," and didn't
even speak to the power or improvements those plugins make.

Retitle "My Bad Experience with Vim contribution and Bram M."

That said, it was a pretty interesting read.

~~~
ggreer
Good points. A better codebase and community typically mean a better
experience for users, but I avoided talking much about concrete benefits
because I thought the post was getting rather long. There are a lot of
opportunities for improving the responsiveness of plugins. Many currently
block the UI in Vim: autocomplete, search, ctrlp-style filename matching, etc.
The list of Neovim-only plugins isn't huge yet, but it's only going to grow
longer as plugin writers take advantage of Neovim's improved API.

------
delish
>Patches are often criticized for ridiculous reasons. After we posted our
patch to the Vim-dev mailing list, the first reply was:

>>NOTE: Don’t use ANSI style function declarations. A few people still have to
use a compiler that doesn’t support it.

>Seriously? C89 is a quarter-century old. The number of people stuck on older
compilers can be counted on one hand. This is a non-concern. Still, I
acquiesced. It was easier to make the change than argue with the critic.

I laughed in agreement with the author at "Seriously?" I seriously can't
imagine who uses a compiler almost as old as I am. But then I started
thinking:

I respect OpenBSD, C compilers, Vim for supporting many platforms for a long
time; that's a programming task I've never approached. I use Ruby in my
business, and don't care about supporting anything but Heroku!

So: what's it like contributing to Vim or OpenBSD, which has a neato-torpedo
list of esoteric supported platforms[0]? Who are the esoteric users, what do
they do, and how do they do it? It'd help me empathize, and not dismiss off-
hand their complaints.

[0] [http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html](http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html)

