Neovim Newsletter – Issue #1 – A New Hope

http://neovim.org/news/2014/june/

by bpierre • 12 years ago

139 29 12 years ago

atrilumen• 12 years ago

Would it not have been better to start from scratch?

pling• 12 years ago

Probably yes. I wondered this myself when I heard about this reengineering project which I agree needs to be done after delving into the vim source before.

However the time to market before it was even slightly usable would be rather large I imagine. I wrote a very basic clone of "ed" in Z80 assembly back in the 90s and it took me nearly 6 months before I trusted it with a file that wasn't disposable.

Perhaps there should be two projects starting at each end of the problem and see which one wins.

pestaa• 12 years ago

I really don't want to see more unnecessary fragmentation in the open source world.

I know, free time is contributed to wherever the programmer pleases, but it's sad to see tons of project not to walk the last mile.

glesica• 12 years ago

I think there was already some idea of how to make the changes they wanted to make, so it made sense to fork since the maintainer wouldn't integrate the changes.

jaredmcateer• 12 years ago

I agree with Joel Spolsky on this subject [1]. From what I've seen when people write something monolithic from scratch they just end up making similar mistakes and introduce new problems that weren't there to begin with. Vim's codebase isn't terrible, it's been going strong for 23 years, but it's accrued a lot of technical debt that makes doing somethings difficult. It's also controlled by a single person, and don't get me wrong this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it makes getting in the necessary changes to achieve the goals of neovim nearly impossible.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

davis2• 12 years ago

I don't think it would have been better. We don't need another TextMate 2 on our hands.

semisight• 12 years ago

Why? Vim is a well tested codebase. It has many features. Starting over would produce better code, but in what timeframe? I think the neovim contributors made the right decision to refactor.

pekk• 12 years ago

By the same token, NeoVim is not a well-tested codebase.

buster• 12 years ago

If youre looking for a fast, small editor with a GUI and text interface, you can check out textadept

cgag• 12 years ago

Probably yes but they'd have had to treat vim as a black box since the code is/was such a disaster.

ludamad• 12 years ago

I think the fact that you can continually have a viable program while doing the sort of refactoring they are doing makes it a lot more easy for lots of people to work on the project. Starting from scratch would mean a large portion of time where only people with a very clear design vision could write components.

noname123• 12 years ago

Tangential but I've been searching for vim plugin that can do intellisense/autocomplete like Eclipse or IntelliJ, does something like this exist?

ffreire2• 12 years ago

Have you given YouCompleteMe a shot? http://valloric.github.io/YouCompleteMe/

leorocky2• 12 years ago

YouComplete does not currently work with neovim as neovim does not ship with python bindings yet.

ben336• 12 years ago

YCM is great. Depending on the language though you may need additional plugins to get "smart" completion into Vim. For instance, tern.js does this for Javascript:

[1] http://ternjs.net/

adamors2• 12 years ago

I use neocomplete[1] myself. It needs a Vim compiled with Lua support (there's also a Lua-less version) and is quite good.

[1] https://github.com/Shougo/neocomplete.vim

jbeja• 12 years ago

YouCompletemeMe plugin can work very well with Eclim.

tokai• 12 years ago

I hope this project merges with vim at some point.

adamors2• 12 years ago

That's not possible. Read the original text on Bountysource [1], the whole idea behind the project was to make a clean break from Vim and implement changes that were ignored when were brought up on the Vim mailing list.

[1] https://www.bountysource.com/teams/neovim/fundraiser

Touche• 12 years ago

By merge you mean replace, right? Because at this point the trees have diverged enough to make a merge a nightmare.

leorocky2• 12 years ago

Though they are backporting vim patches all the time. Some of those patches must be hard to backport into neovim given the divergence.

weaksauce• 12 years ago

There are a few things that impress me with the neovim project

1. The speed in the refactoring.

2. The (apparent) ability to come to a consensus quickly.

3. The quality and depth of the communication of the progress and ideas.

I wish them all the success.

johnsea• 12 years ago

Incredible, how fast they move. And it feels very professional & friendly.

Neovim Newsletter – Issue #1 – A New Hope

Related Stories