[HN Gopher] Vim after Bram: a core maintainer on how they've kep...
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Vim after Bram: a core maintainer on how they've kept it going
Author : MilnerRoute
Score : 170 points
Date : 2025-02-16 15:44 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thenewstack.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (thenewstack.io)
| zargon wrote:
| Related: The State of Vim, 200 comments
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42810176
| mariogreymist wrote:
| This project is just like the program: people can't seem to quit.
| skirge wrote:
| Neuralink or something is needed to make keybindings
| unnecessary. Computer, delete this paragraph. computer move to
| next function. Computer replace this word.
| Bootvis wrote:
| It's called a keyboard and muscle memory.
| aquariusDue wrote:
| Still, it's nice to think about a future where Brain-
| Computer Interfaces are advanced enough that you could
| feasibly write code while leaning on your elbows with your
| chin tucked into your palms. Of course you'd still be
| staring into a large mass of Java 8...
| renewedrebecca wrote:
| And companies will then force you to watch ads while you
| sleep. No thanks.
| skirge wrote:
| it requires training and thus is expensive
| johnea wrote:
| ha ha! That's really funny 8-) Not sarcastically, actually
| entertaining 8-)
|
| I had to upvote, even though I totally disagree, just because
| it made me laugh out loud (not lol, actually laughing, you
| know, like when noise comes out of your mouth)
|
| I've been saying for years, that as soon as the matrix spinal
| tap was available, people would be lined up to get it.
|
| Reality is so boomer! Who wants to remember things when we
| can immerse ourselves in our pure make-believe identity. 8-)
|
| I really really am so glad I grew up before internet brain
| damage destroyed the concept of individual autonomy.
| meitham wrote:
| I love vim and I'm happy Chris stepped in to save the project,
| his vim CSV plugin is something I use daily. Though I really hope
| vim and neovim merge, I don't see a reason for the two projects
| to stay separate.
| freedomben wrote:
| I have had similar thoughts, and have even theorized that the
| two would merge at some point. But that said, The goals of the
| two projects are still pretty different. It sounds like Vim
| proper is going to start receiving More new features, but
| overall it still has a significant focus on stability. I do
| wonder if that will shift as the new maintainers get more and
| more confident and capable in the code base. Once that occurs,
| I suspect that neovim will start to look really good, even
| perhaps including to the vim proper maintainers.
|
| What might be a big difference though and a big enough
| stumbling block to prevent merging is the fact that neovim code
| base has been refactored extensively and updated. Having worked
| in a big project that was refactored without me, and then
| returned, it is actually worse than a new code base because you
| feel like you should know where things are, but they aren't
| there. It continually misleads you and wastes your time. I
| could see that frustration being enough to keep the them proper
| people from merging or moving to neovim.
| mkozlows wrote:
| Given what he's saying here -- that Vim is in "maintenance
| mode" -- I don't think you'll need any formal merge. Neovim is
| just where all new development is done, and it'll slowly
| replace traditional Vim over time.
| meitham wrote:
| I'm not sure admins of old mainframes from the 80s would be
| interested in getting latest vim running on their hosts! I
| still use whatever old version of vim that came with my
| freenas.
| mkozlows wrote:
| I mean, sure. But like, vim never merged with vi, either --
| to this day, you can find old things that are still running
| pre-vim versions of vi. It's just that over time, more and
| more things switched their default version of vi to vim,
| just as over time, more and more things will switch their
| default version of vim to neovim.
| Keyframe wrote:
| vi != vim
| mi_lk wrote:
| > Neovim is just where all new development is done, and it'll
| slowly replace traditional Vim over time.
|
| Nailed it. Bram made the decision on his own and vim's fate
| is stuck with it. I was bitter about it but now I think it's
| best for both communities.
| johnea wrote:
| "replace" ha ha!
|
| Not likely. The directions for the projects seem pretty
| distinct.
|
| It should be noted that some original vi are still installed
| by default when installing some OSs.
|
| The whole idea that a project needs to be in constant new-
| feature mode is just not reality. Just as one example: I'm
| still using the fluxbox desktop (about 25 years now), and it
| still meets my top level GUI needs for interacting with my
| workstation. I don't really _want_ it to change. I want the
| UI to be exactly the same after an update, so as not to
| disrupt my workflow.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| I do not believe that is possible without compromising the
| goals of one of the two projects.
|
| Vim is expected to continue to work everywhere, even on some
| bank's circa 1980 mainframe. NeoVIM has become an effort to
| revitalize the project. Support for ancient systems was tossed
| almost immediately (eg no more 8.3 filename support code).
| NeoVIM also included some much improved default configuration
| values.
| dleeftink wrote:
| > even on some bank's circa 1980 mainframe
|
| Continuity I get, but how much are we collectively burdened
| by having a few ancient uses determine the wants of the many?
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| Our window of compatibility only seems to grow larger over
| time. Old systems mostly get replaced when they lose
| function or the replacement becomes cheaper. But the
| replacement usually expects to last slightly longer than
| what its replacing. We've seen this slowly creep up in home
| computers, phones and even servers. I would argue that this
| is a function of small incremental improvements in
| everything from hard drives to computing.
|
| Lots of designs from the past can no longer connect to the
| internet in a meaningfull capacity but new hardware today
| might meaningfully last far longer than the developers
| could even anticipate.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I wonder about that, too. Not that anyone's beating my door
| down to port my own projects to zOS or anything, but I
| consider modern Linux/BSD to be my baseline target for all
| new code I write. If it runs well on amd64/aarch64 Linux,
| Mac, and {Free,Open}BSD, that's enough. Well, and Windows,
| if someone makes it run there and it's not onerous to
| support. I wouldn't accept patches that make it harder to
| build or maintain on those primary systems.
|
| It's not that I actively hate anything that isn't a recent
| 64-bit Unix, but that the people on other systems are
| either 1) hobbyists who are competent to port stuff to
| their own systems, or 2) companies who aren't paying me for
| extraordinary support.
|
| Bummer if something I wrote last week doesn't run on HP-UX,
| but it's not going to cost me sleep.
| jnwatson wrote:
| I had to think long and hard about whether to accept a PR
| that fixed ppcle64 support on the library I maintain.
| Since it wasn't too much of a diff, I accepted it, but in
| many other situations I wouldn't.
| kstrauser wrote:
| If it's trivial with zero adverse affects on common
| hardware, fine. If it adds the equivalent of a bunch of
| ifdefs or requires adding autoconf, nah.
| diggan wrote:
| > Continuity I get, but how much are we collectively
| burdened by having a few ancient uses determine the wants
| of the many?
|
| Because of neovim and the power of forking, essentially
| nothing. The ones who favor stability choose one program,
| the ones who favor bleeding-edge chooses another that
| matches.
| kps wrote:
| Vim is also POSIX-compliant (or very close, with
| compatibility options, on a POSIX platform). Neovim doesn't
| have that goal.
| umbs wrote:
| "... vim and neovim merge,..."
|
| This seems very unlikely. In neovim help docs there's a
| paragraph in file `nvim.txt` Nvim is
| emphatically a fork of Vim, not a clone: compatibility
| with Vim (especially editor and Vimscript features) is
| maintained where possible. See |vim differences| for the
| complete reference of differencesfrom Vim.
|
| nvim maintainers believe the project diverged and compatibility
| is best effort at this stage. Essentially, there's no plan to
| merge the two projects at this stage and the benefits are not
| evident.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I have to say as someone in tech, one of my "personal
| embarrassments" is that I still only know how to use vim on a
| basic level. I often see my coworkers flying through our
| codebases in their custom vim/nvim setups and I gotta say I get a
| bit jealous.
|
| But every time I think about learning vim I always go back to the
| argument that it's just a tool to get a job done and right now,
| I'm very good with one particular tool (vscode) and between my
| dayjob and other responsibilities I just can't justify the time
| sink to learn vim to a level where I can be "professionally
| productive". For now I mainly use it for git and the occasional
| markdown document I need to create on the fly
|
| But beyond that I really admire vim and nvmim. The fact that my
| coworkers can use a 30 year old text editor and extend it to
| support the latest and greatest LLM's and language servers is
| just mental to me.
|
| I hope Bram is up in heaven right now, teaching god how to quit
| vim.
| kombine wrote:
| As someone who used VS Code for many years and before that
| PyCharm, it only took me a couple of weeks to regain full
| "professional productivity" after switching to Neovim. But it
| will take me years to master Vim.
| jaimebuelta wrote:
| For anyone that wants to learn Vim I really recommend
| "practical Vim" [1] .
|
| It's a fantastic book that really gets into developing the
| right mindset to use it. It's great once you "get it", but it's
| a different concept from the rest of text editors. Once you
| learn the basics, you'll do great advancements in little time.
|
| To me, it's the best tech book that's I've read. It's really
| that good.
|
| [1] https://pragprog.com/titles/dnvim2/practical-vim-second-
| edit...
| ethagnawl wrote:
| `vimtutor` is also excellent and most folks either already
| have it or can get it in the next few minutes.
| lukaslalinsky wrote:
| I'm similarly embarrassed about only knowing vim on a basic
| level, but I've actually been using it as my main editor for
| programming for close to 20 years. I still navigate using arrow
| keys, for example. After years of tweaking, I now use nvim with
| the default config and I'm pretty happy with the minimalism.
| Despite only having very basic knowledge, I'm still more
| comfortable in vim than most other editors. Only the recent
| wave of AI assistants is getting me to use it less often.
| wruza wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with arrow keys, Esc or mouse. Using
| Vim doesn't mean you have to buy into elitist pianism.
| Personally I don't care about typing speed because I map,
| abbr and snippet code "to death". All I want is to free my
| mind (not hands) from mundane work as much as possible and h
| vs left arrow doesn't help with that at all. I don't even
| land on homerow when I take the keyboard. It's more like qwed
| kop' and changing.
| et1337 wrote:
| I highly recommend the VSVim extension for VSCode. There's no
| need to dive into the overwhelming world of customizing vim.
| You can get all the benefits of modal editing in your existing
| editor. In fact VSCode is even better with its built-in multi-
| cursor support.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Eh. I use vim. I like vim. But what matters is that you have a
| tool that works. If that's vscode, and you're okay with that
| being your tool[0] then there's nothing wrong with that.
|
| [0] I personally wouldn't like to be tied to a tool that phones
| home to and is by Microsoft, but plenty of people don't care;
| so long as it's an informed choice that's completely
| legitimate.
| picafrost wrote:
| I've been using vim for 20+ years and it's been fantastically
| stable software for me. I have never cared about what version I
| am using because I've never needed to. An exception to this is
| that I'm now accustomed to using `:term` which came with vim 8.0
| (2016?).
|
| I think it's silly when colleagues point out that VS Code has vim
| bindings. The bindings are what I know and enjoy, but they're
| only half the point. I like to work with the machine, in the
| terminal. I don't like my text editor being a browser that pings
| M$, and _will_ end up doing so again, eventually, even after I
| have to search up(!) how to disable it.
|
| There's a lot of value in moving slow and not breaking things.
| I'm glad there are maintainers willing to carry that spirit
| forward.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I only notice vim 9.0 because it highlights as you search.
| Otherwise I'm in total agreement.
| Sesse__ wrote:
| ":set hlsearch" in pretty much any version of vim. (I don't
| know if vim 9.0 changed the default or not.)
| 0x0203 wrote:
| I'm right there with you on using :term. I also do a lot of
| work on console only tty's without X or gui environments and
| splitting between code/text and term is very handy.
| arp242 wrote:
| Few years ago I reported that I can't put a character in the
| most bottom-right corner when setting my own statusline. Bram
| responded that this was intentional, as some (presumably
| already ancient) terminal emulators had problems with this.
|
| I can probably take the vimrc and workflow I had for Vim 6 back
| in ~2000 and use it in the latest Vim without any changes or
| problems.
|
| And look, if VS Code or whatever works better for some people:
| great! Fantastic that works for you! But for me, the dedication
| to compatibility and not breaking existing use cases is
| something I've really come to appreciate, even though it's a
| slight annoyance at times.
| xyst wrote:
| Didn't know "the" core maintainer of vim has passed. But very
| nice to hear community has rallied to keep the project alive
| despite losing such a key person.
|
| In the race to incorporate AI in everything, it has turned me
| away from tools such as VSCode, IntelliJ. Instead have reverted
| to use of vim/nvim, setting up my own development environment,
| customizing it to my liking with desired mappings, and enhancing
| with plugins on an as needed basis.
|
| Even with all of my customizations, code completion is still
| snappy (since it's lazily loaded), and I do feel more productive
| compared to GUI editors.
|
| Only downside is collaboration with coworkers that have always
| learned to use a GUI editors. In those cases I just open up
| whatever text editor corp uses (most cases it's just vscode).
|
| Although for co-workers I dislike, I do love to see them struggle
| to use vim.
| compiler_queen wrote:
| Anyone who doesn't use Vim is just evil in my eyes, I mean, come
| on! It's the best thing ever.
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