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posted by janrinok on Thursday March 20 2014, @12:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the cue-vim-emacs-war-in-5-4-3-2-1 dept.

Hell_Rok writes:

"Neovim is an effort to aggressively re-factor the Vim source code and improve on:

  • It will provide first class support for embedding.
  • It lets you extend the editor in any programming language.
  • It supports more powerful GUIs.
  • Vim plugins will work with it.

Hosted on Bounty Source it has reached $25,500 of it's goal of $10,000, although there are still 3 days to reach further stretch goals! You can view the projects current progress and even pitch in over at GitHub. As someone who has started using Vim full-time over the last 6 months I feel that this is a very good project for the longevity of Vim."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by hubie on Thursday March 20 2014, @12:35PM

    by hubie (1068) on Thursday March 20 2014, @12:35PM (#18941) Journal

    I'm sure there is a lot of cleanup that can be done, and this is a good thing, and I know there is a fine line between "nice-to-have" and "needs-to-have", but apart from that does vim have longevity issues?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 20 2014, @12:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 20 2014, @12:40PM (#18942)

    Yep. Emacs is clearly superior and kicking Vi(m)'s ass.

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 20 2014, @01:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 20 2014, @01:07PM (#18955)

      Can NeoVim finally be the decent text editor that Emacs has been missing to be a complete OS?

      • (Score: 0, Redundant) by JohnnyComputer on Thursday March 20 2014, @01:09PM

        by JohnnyComputer (3502) on Thursday March 20 2014, @01:09PM (#18958)

        This is sort of funny. +1 man.

      • (Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday March 20 2014, @02:22PM

        by Thexalon (636) on Thursday March 20 2014, @02:22PM (#18998) Homepage

        Unnecessary: You can already run vim inside of emacs, by using "M-x term". Emacs will prompt you with "Run program:", and then you enter in /usr/bin/vim (or wherever you have one), and poof, you now have vim running in emacs.

        --
        Every task is easy if somebody else is doing it.
        • (Score: 2, Funny) by rufty on Thursday March 20 2014, @07:05PM

          by rufty (381) on Thursday March 20 2014, @07:05PM (#19101)

          So what I need is M-x term find / -type f -name emacs | xargs rm -f ???

        • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday March 21 2014, @05:31AM

          by isostatic (365) on Friday March 21 2014, @05:31AM (#19211)

          That's fine, as I can the type !emacs from vim, and up pops emacs.

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by isostatic on Thursday March 20 2014, @01:19PM

      by isostatic (365) on Thursday March 20 2014, @01:19PM (#18963)

      Eight megabytes and constantly swapping? No thanks, I like my text editor lean and mean.

      • (Score: 2) by buswolley on Thursday March 20 2014, @01:25PM

        by buswolley (848) on Thursday March 20 2014, @01:25PM (#18967)

        /sarcasm?

        --
        subicular junctures
        • (Score: 2, Insightful) by DNied on Thursday March 20 2014, @06:45PM

          by DNied (3409) on Thursday March 20 2014, @06:45PM (#19094) Homepage

          /sarcasm?

          I sure hope so. "Lean" is about the last word that comes to mind when thinking of Vim. Gimme Nvi any day of the week (I'm even using it to type this post!)

      • (Score: 2) by lx on Thursday March 20 2014, @02:01PM

        by lx (1915) on Thursday March 20 2014, @02:01PM (#18984)

        I can still (vaguely) remember a time when 8 megabytes was a lot of memory. Like six floppies [tumblr.com].

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 20 2014, @02:30PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 20 2014, @02:30PM (#19006)

          If you've ever worked with 8-bit or 16-bit microcontrollers it still is!

      • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday March 21 2014, @05:01AM

        by TheRaven (270) on Friday March 21 2014, @05:01AM (#19197) Journal
        Escape Meta Alt Control Shift? I prefer an editor designed for human hands...
        --
        sudo mod me up
        • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday March 21 2014, @05:23AM

          by isostatic (365) on Friday March 21 2014, @05:23AM (#19207)

          Quite, hence using vim with caps lock mapped to escape. Hands never move far.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by jtt on Thursday March 20 2014, @06:03PM

    by jtt (3540) on Thursday March 20 2014, @06:03PM (#19083) Homepage

    If the code is getting too intransparent to make any changes than there's not a "longevity" but a "petrification" issue - people willing to improve it will become discouraged if it's too hard to find out where what is happening where within a reasonable amount of time. And in the long run there will be less an less improvements.

    I've recently ported vim to an ebook-reader and luckily had only to deal with some issues with terminal settings that could be resolved in a relatively short amount of time. And the vim code is definitely not one of the worst I've seen (there are even a lot of comments;-) But given the sheer size of it (the src directory alown is about 380 kLoC in C and header files) I think it's not really optimal for allowing even experienced programmers to quickly find their way around. Having a lot of '#if' and '#else" stuff to cater for different environments doesn't help a lot and functions that run for several hundreds of lines also don't. So a "refactoring" (whatever it may mean as long as it makes the code easier to understand) could help to make vim an editor that's mallable enough to be used also in the future because it's easy enough to adapt to new requirements.

    And if there are a lot of people willing to spend money on the chance of keeping vim alive and able to address further needs what's wrong with that? From what I've seen nearly every piece of software could benefit from a rewrite after 10 to 15 years (but which hardly ever happens). If neovim succeeds it may make vi an editor more fit for the future

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Koen on Thursday March 20 2014, @07:23PM

    by Koen (427) on Thursday March 20 2014, @07:23PM (#19113)

    does vim have longevity issues?

    From TFA [bountysource.com]:

    Problem

    Over its more than 20 years of life, vim has accumulated about 300k lines of scary C89 code that very few people understand or have the guts to mess with.

    Another issue is that as the only person responsible for maintaing vim's big codebase, Bram Moolenaar has to be extra-careful when accepting patches because once merged, the new code will be his responsibility.

    These problems make it very difficult to have new features and bug fixes merged into the core. vim just can't keep up with the development speed of its plugin ecosystem.

    and also:

    I'm the author of vim's event loop patch and the job control patch, which were big motivators for this project.

    --
    /. refugees on Usenet: comp.misc [comp.misc]