Dev.SN

NeoVim: Vim's Re-birth for the 21st Century

posted by janrinok on Thursday March 20 2014, @12:27PM   
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."

• Longevity or petrification? (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

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