Questions with Vim’s Creator, Bram Moolenaar

http://www.binpress.com/blog/2014/11/19/vim-creator-bram-moolenaar-interview/

by ProfDreamer • 12 years ago

195 74 12 years ago

Reebles• 12 years ago

Not sure why Bram doesn't believe that removing support for obsolete OSes such as MS-DOS, Amiga, and BeOs helps with Neovim's goal of simplifying the codebase and maintenance. Are there even any actual users of these systems that are disappointed that they won't be able to use neovim? If they're satisfied on those OSes surely they'd be satisfied with legacy vim.

teacup50• 12 years ago

Bulk churn is the kind of easy task that gives the impression of progress while providing very little actual value.

In 8 months, here's what NeoVim has done:

1) Reformatted all the code.

2) Deleted a lot of working, old code.

3) Raised a good chunk of cash.

4) Published a very shiny website.

5) Released nothing.

There's nothing wrong with simplifying a code base, but if you run around trying to do that independent of any reasonable technical direction, you're just making noise.

Given that NeoVim's technical direction is extremely poorly considered (while also disparaging Bram's work), I can't help but think highly of Bram for being polite -- at all -- to such a disrespectful fork.

sondr32• 12 years ago

I don't really see any problems here, they haven't made any promises either to release anything either before they are up to speed with where they want to be, just looking at their Github repo shows that there's a lot of activity going on. I'm really looking forward to seeing where they are going. In eight months things may have changed drastically, who knows, but I think that NeoVIM is going to be great. Besides, this is a bit like complaining about vim being a fork of vi, it's how things goes with open source software.

dennyabraham• 12 years ago

neovim is in the process of several major under-the-hood refactorings to enable larger scale changes. If it's not immediately apparent to you what the team is working on, you can see the project goals and progress thereupon on the project tracker.

https://waffle.io/neovim/neovim

kev6168• 12 years ago

How is forking an open source project disrespectful? For the past eight months I have only seen Neovim folks being very professional, open, and quick to respond to user input. They have been keeping their heads down quietly working on extremely hard problems.

Natively supporting Lua/LuaJIT and Python in writing asynchronous plugins, this alone is worth the wait. I am willing to give them A LOT MORE than 8 months if they can pull just this single feature off.

The request for Python integration has been sitting at the top of Vim's voting list for many years. It must be a very very difficult task, otherwise it could be done years ago. http://www.vim.org/sponsor/vote_results.php/

Other than the new plugin infrastructure, Neovim's GUI and embedding systems will be awesome. Anyway, I applaud people who explore and try to make progress (like from Vi to Vim, a natural process). In the mean time, I am happily using Vim which is both extremely powerful and stable.

TL,DR; I can wait.

jballanc• 12 years ago

5) Released nothing.

I've been tracking the neovim repo for a while, and my feeling is that they could have easily made a couple of releases with stability matching some other notable projects, but they have intentionally chosen to be conservative and wait.

If you want an example of one area where there has been work and improvement, check out the Wiki page on the updated clipboard integration: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Python-plugins,-clipbo... . Yeah, it's different, and not yet as capable as Vim's built-in clipboard integration. But if they are headed toward a goal of more generalized integration points, then this is a strong step in the right direction.

ggreer2• 12 years ago

Your comment seems to consist of some things that aren't true, and some true things accompanied with baseless insinuations.

1. The code was reformatted because Vim's codebase is a mess. It mixes tabs and spaces willy-nilly. It uses different indentation rules in different parts of files. These issues may seem cosmetic, but they make the code harder to follow and increase the likelihood of bugs. Indentation can be especially misleading when control flow lacks braces (a common occurrence in Vim). The change didn't require much effort and it made it easier for people to contribute to Neovim.

2. Actually, quite a bit of Vim's old platform-specific code is broken. It's just that nobody uses an SGI IRIS or Amiga, so nobody complains about it. In some cases, Neovim removed ifdef'd code that could never possibly be included[1].

3. People have donated less than $40k to Neovim. That's not even the salary of a single developer for the 8 months it's been around. The contributors aren't in it for the money. They simply want to build a great editor.

4. A very shiny website? It's just static pages hosted on Github. If you look at the commit history[2], you can see it's insignificant compared to work done on the Neovim codebase.

5. Nothing? There's an entire repository of working code. Right now you can clone Neovim, compile it, and it will run almost all Vim plugins without issue. The team is very conservative about declaring software stable. They may not have a tagged release, but to call the existing work "nothing" is unreasonable. It's at least as stable as Atom.

You also neglected to mention all the other work done on Neovim, such as replacing ad-hoc cross-platform compatibility and event handling with libuv. Then there's the improved plugin APIs which allow features that aren't possible in Vim.[3] And of course, plugins can be written in any language. No more VimL shims needed.

Lastly: Disparaging? Disrespectful? It's hard to find any criticism the Neovim contributors have made towards Bram or Vim. They like Bram. They like Vim. Thiago tried to contribute to Vim multiple times, but was discouraged or ignored.[4][5] Instead of complaining or giving up, he and the other contributors are trying to improve the editor and the community around it. There's no malice or greed involved.

1. https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/814

2. https://github.com/neovim/neovim.github.io/

3. https://github.com/benekastah/neomake

4. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/vim_dev/QF7Bzh1YABU/02-YGr7_...

5. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/vim_dev/65jjGqS1_VQ/fFiFrrIB...

sbilstein• 12 years ago

I often refer to these two pieces when debating rebooting a project from scratch:

Joel Spolksy Things You Should Never Do Part 1 http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Darmesh Shah How To Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite Without Losing Your Sanity (a response to essay #1 13 years later) http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/97052/How-To-Survive-a-...

It's not always cut and dry when you should start over, but if you are make sure you are doing it in a way that starts presenting customer/user value ASAP.

SamReidHughes2• 12 years ago

Are you familiar with Vim's code? How is support for those OSes making things substantially more complicated?

ggreer2• 12 years ago

Are you familiar with Vim's code? Just look at all the OS-specific files in the source tree[1]. Not only that, there are ifdefs-galore in the shared code. RealWaitForChar is over 400 lines and contains 41 ifdefs.[2] Many are for long-dead features or platforms. That function just waits for user input, but it has to be ridiculously complicated to account for platforms without basic functions like select(). The infamous eval.c starts off with ifdefs for Amiga, VMS, and Mac OS Classic.[3] Neovim has ripped out tons of this stuff, and it's drastically reduced line count.

1. https://github.com/b4winckler/macvim/tree/master/src

2. https://github.com/b4winckler/macvim/blob/master/src/os_unix...

3. https://github.com/b4winckler/macvim/blob/master/src/eval.c

coldtea6• 12 years ago

You don't have to be familiar with Vim's code to know that having support for obsolete OSes makes the code substantially more complicated.

johncoltrane3• 12 years ago

That's not what he said. He said that Neovim's goals could be achieved without cutting out features and removing supports for exotic OSes.

coldtea6• 12 years ago

He said that Neovim's goals could be achieved without cutting out features and removing supports for exotic OSes.

That's the same as what parent said.

Neovim's #1 goal (from the webpage) is: "Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to simplify maintenance and encourage contributions". And other goals including adding new features for the future.

You might not 100% HAVE to drop "supports for exotic OSes" for that, but is extremely logical, and very much helpful in that direction.

Anything that reduces code size makes it easier for maintanance. You don't want to have to check how things play for those IFDEFS for Amiga OS when you write code for 2014.

jvm• 12 years ago

8: How can the community ensure that the Vim project succeeds for the foreseeable future? Keep me alive. :-)

Odd to express narcissism in response to this question.

I have no idea whether NeoVim is going in the right direction but the feeling you get from this response is that Bram is focused on guarding his turf rather than thinking constructively about how to move Vim forward.

rbonvall• 12 years ago

I'm sure it was just a playful response.

In case anyone doesn't know, this is Vim's license:

”Vim is Charityware. You can use and copy it as much as you like, but you are encouraged to make a donation for needy children in Uganda.”

Hard to believe the guy is narcissistic at all :)

razammataz• 12 years ago

Note that Bram is the treasurer of said charity. You can read their latest financial report here:

http://iccf-holland.org/jaarrekening2013en.pdf

imron• 12 years ago

Odd that even with a smiley face, some people miss tongue-in-cheek humour.

notduncansmith• 12 years ago

Poe's Law at work.

pherocity_• 12 years ago

I can't help but feel, since many of the same arguments against neovim could be said of the rewrite from vi to vim, that this is the natural order of things and the point of open source.

DontGiveTwoFlux• 12 years ago

Wasn't vi closed source until Bram came along? Then the name just got changed to vim because of the additions along the way?

stsp• 12 years ago

vi history in BSD goes back to 1980

Sources are at http://svnweb.freebsd.org/csrg/usr.bin/ex/

adambenayoun• 12 years ago

If you liked this interview - make sure to check the other podcasts we recorded:

http://www.binpress.com/blog/category/podcast/

andyl• 12 years ago

It's unfortunate that Bram isn't more enthusiastic about NeoVim - it looks to me like they have made great progress and gathering momentum. NeoVim's support for Lua, Ruby and Python plugins, embeddable core would be a big step forward.

coldtea6• 12 years ago

No idea. Some of the basic choices seem odd and irrelevant for the main goals. Such as dropping support for some systems and not being backwards compatible. The goals could just as well been implemented without that.

How are those steps "odd and irrelevant"?

Dropping support for BS OS makes the code leaner and cleaner, and easier to update.

hyp02• 12 years ago

persistent undo seems pretty cool!

enable with :set undofile in .vimrc

NB: if you want to specify a dir for it, you need to create it yourself, or it silently won't work. eg mkdir ~/.vim/undodir, then in .vimrc :set undodir=~/.vim/undodir

I also love the idea of undotree, with branches etc, but found it too confusing in practice. Could the UI be more git-like, I wonder?

hf• 12 years ago

As with many of Vim's questionable but ultimately effective interface decisions, I have found 'chronological undo' to alleviate all my undo-tree-related pains: Step through the undo tree sequentially with 'g+' and 'g-' until you've found what you're looking for.

hyp02• 12 years ago

whoa, just tried it, works and makes sense! It just undoes everything, including undos; but not g-/g+ themselves (which are purely browsing). Nice SO ans: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1088864/how-is-vims-undo-...

certainly_not• 12 years ago

undotree only becomes usable once you install https://github.com/sjl/gundo.vim

It's a lifesaver after that.

thebelal• 12 years ago

Completely agree with this. I actually think vims undo tree might be the most useful feature in vim for me. You can basically use it as version control lite with automatic commits.

alwillis2• 12 years ago

You took the words right out of my mouth. Gundo is great.

jordanlewis• 12 years ago

It's one of my favorite features!

Full disclosure - I made it during my Google Summer of Code with Bram in 2008.

diego898• 12 years ago

it was the feature that kept me on vim for years until moving to sublime. I wish someone would implement it for sublime as well!

tempodox• 12 years ago

Spoiler alert: I won't say anything about NeoVim.

From the article: Write nice code. Use white space properly, use good names for methods, add comments to explain anything that isn’t obvious...

I do wish more people subscribed to that notion, even if it doesn't sound like the magic recipe to become the next rockstar ninja.

(Edit: Cloning the Zombie of Obscure Comment Formatting)

unfunco• 12 years ago

My favourite question and answer from this is the last one.

Q: "What does the future hold for Vim?" – A: "Nothing spectacular."

That's quite a refreshing view, I don't think a person exists that has mastered Vim absolutely, who knows the most efficient way to achieve everything they need to. It probably takes just as long to master Vim than it has for Vim to be developed to where it is, and it's good to see that there's a focus on improving the existing functionality than extending it further.

segmondy• 12 years ago

Just because you haven't doesn't mean others haven't. You will be surprised.

Bjartr• 12 years ago

I think his statement there is more an observation about how every time a discussion about some less used vim feature comes up there is invariably at least one person to say "I've been using vim for x decades and never knew this".

alwillis2• 12 years ago

We as developers and open source advocates have to get over this "thou shall not ever remove code" no matter how old and useless it may be.

What the NeoVim team is doing sounds a whole lot like what the libressl team did when they forked OpenSSL, which also had tons of code for obsolete operating systems.

At the point of this presentation[1], they removed 90,000 lines of code; it's probably more now.

Unlike system software like OpenSSL, Vim is something I (and many developers) spend many hours each day using. In 2014, there's no good reason why it shouldn't be as responsive and flexible as possible.

Sometimes when my projects get large and have lots of files open and Vim starts to slowdown just a little, you can almost feel the decades of technical debt taking its toll.

As someone mentioned previously, the function that waits for user input [2] is 400 lines long and has more the 41 ifdefs, many for operating systems that have been long dead.

Interestingly enough, it's because of the growing popularity of Vim that this is becoming more of an issue. I live in the Boston area and have visited many startups; Vim is quite popular among them. Yes, it's a little hipster, but in a good way. ;-)

We have lots of seasoned developers at our Vim meetup [3] of course, but there are way more younger people who've discovered Vim. The room is usually packed.

1. http://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00026.htm...

2. https://github.com/b4winckler/macvim/blob/master/src/os_unix...

3. http://www.meetup.com/The-Boston-Vim-Meetup/

Questions with Vim’s Creator, Bram Moolenaar

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