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Vim Boss

neovim.io

71–80 of 123 posts

Re: Vim Boss

#71
post #59
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand this point, and I tried to parse it and still don't. (...) If vim maintainers don't want neovim to exist, they should have accepted the merges earlier. If they disagree with the merges (which I think they did), then that power doesn't belong in Vim anyways It's a very simple point to understand: whether the merges are good or not, the presence of a fork still "splits the Vim community and takes p…

> That's regardless of people "having the right to fork". Yes they do. But also yes, if they exercize that right, they do split a community and divert interest from a project to 2 projects. You're not dividing the same-sized pie. The alternative to a fork is a single project with fewer contributors. The alternative to two communities is a single community that's not as large as the two would've been, with a good chun…

>You're not dividing the same-sized pie.

We do. Neither vim-or-vim-fork editor users nor vim-or-vim-fork-potential-devs are going to see any significant jump in population from the presense of neovim. People who are new to vim-style-editors and go to neovim are mainly people who would have gone to vim if neovim didn't exist.

And from people contributing to vim via themes, plugins, etc., some have taken their talents to neovim, which would have stayed with vim if neovim didn't exist.

>Forks are good

Well, the prevalent wisdom of 30+ years of FOSS has been that they're mostly bad.

Re: Vim Boss

#73

Today at a train station in the Netherlands (Utrecht) I noticed something special. I saw the letters hjkl on the sign in reverse order. These letters indentify the platform areas where you can enter the train. Depending on the length of the platform and the area where the train has entrances, it shows the letters. https://postimg.cc/mcCWhMXw Either this was super coincidence, or someone at the NS (the Dutch train com…

Although I use vim, I associate these letters more with the home row for touch typists.

Home row is jkl;

Re: Vim Boss

#74
In a world of fleeting software, Vim is a timeless masterpiece.

I only wish I had the opportunity to thank Bram for the impact he's had on my life and career, because I don't think I would have come as far without Vim.

Re: Vim Boss

#75
post #8

So often we hear after someone dies how great they really where when infact they were like most people, a mixed bag. We all have ups and downs etc. There are some though that really do live up to the postmortem messages and for sure Bram is one of them, i was lucky to meet him and actually spend some time shooting shit with him. At the time i didn't realize how big a deal he was, it was only later i would actually ge…

I occasionally ponder on how frustrating it is that the deceased don't get to hear their eulogies. It would have been amazing for Bram to have been able to experience all the outpouring of support and love from people he is interacted with during his life. Especially in a context where the speakers aren't considering him as an audience -- they're sharing their deep and true feelings. No one can really be sure how the…

Cue "Waking Ned Divine" reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXe_kRQdHfU

Re: Vim Boss

#77
post #71
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's regardless of people "having the right to fork". Yes they do. But also yes, if they exercize that right, they do split a community and divert interest from a project to 2 projects. You're not dividing the same-sized pie. The alternative to a fork is a single project with fewer contributors. The alternative to two communities is a single community that's not as large as the two would've been, with a good chun…

> You're not dividing the same-sized pie. We do. Neither vim-or-vim-fork editor users nor vim-or-vim-fork-potential-devs are going to see any significant jump in population from the presense of neovim. People who are new to vim-style-editors and go to neovim are mainly people who would have gone to vim if neovim didn't exist. And from people contributing to vim via themes, plugins, etc., some have taken their talents…

You are stating these things as though they were established facts. But they seem to be opinions. Or do you have data to back them up?

> People who are new to vim-style-editors and go to neovim are mainly people who would have gone to vim if neovim didn't exist.

It seems reasonable to assume that a lot of new people would not pick up either Vim or Neovim without LSP integration and Tree-sitter.

Vim has adopted a lot of the early features of Neovim and now Vim9 also has things like virtual text for rendering LSP diagnostics in the buffer[1] and there is a Vim9 LSP plugin too. But it does not at all seem likely that Vim would have these were it not for the push from Neovim.

Besides, it looks like Vim still does not have mature support for Tree-sitter.[2]

> Well, the prevalent wisdom of 30+ years of FOSS has been that they're mostly bad.

There are many famous forks from the past 30 years that hardly anybody calls bad. Some examples: Net/Free/OpenBSD, GNU/XEmacs, Open/LibreSSL. These projects allowed people with different goals or values to carry on in their own directions, while also motivating each other to pick up development pace. They have often also shared code with each other.

[1] Which looks like this: https://sr.ht/%7Ewhynothugo/lsp_lines.nvim/

[2] One experimental plugin I came across: https://github.com/mattn/vim-treesitter

Re: Vim Boss

#78
post #71
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's regardless of people "having the right to fork". Yes they do. But also yes, if they exercize that right, they do split a community and divert interest from a project to 2 projects. You're not dividing the same-sized pie. The alternative to a fork is a single project with fewer contributors. The alternative to two communities is a single community that's not as large as the two would've been, with a good chun…

> You're not dividing the same-sized pie. We do. Neither vim-or-vim-fork editor users nor vim-or-vim-fork-potential-devs are going to see any significant jump in population from the presense of neovim. People who are new to vim-style-editors and go to neovim are mainly people who would have gone to vim if neovim didn't exist. And from people contributing to vim via themes, plugins, etc., some have taken their talents…

I'm not so sure.

Neovim migrated to a more modern style of C and more tightly integrated Lua as its scripting language (instead of conscript). Those are two large potential stumbling blocks for contributors.

From loosely following development over the years, I see names like chrisbra and justinmk who contribute to both projects, but there seem to be many who contribute to neovim but never contributed to vim.

Neovim also seems to have influenced the development of vim: channels, jobs, terminal mode, and issues/PRs on github (instead of mailinglists) felt like shifts in response to neovim.

I think it's also to Bram, justinmk, and other maintainers credit that the two projects contribute back and forth: many vim fixes are merged to neovim and I see big changes get brought back to vim too.

Re: Vim Boss

#79
post #10

Thanks Bram. I've been using Vim (and sometimes more recently Neovim) for over 30 years (nearly every work day of my entire career), having used `vi` on various BSD systems in school. In all that time, I've never been on the mailing list for Vim, asked a question or submitted a bug report. I've never needed to do so . Because I've never run into a bug or had a question that couldn't be answered by the built in docume…

It was 25 years ago this fall that I got a job in the IT department of my university and my boss gave me the perl and vi O'Reilly books so I could start programming on the unix servers. Like you, I've used it (and vim) every day of my career since then.

Re: Vim Boss

#80
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another thread on HN about vim development going forward, posted on the Google Group for vim development. Christian Brabandt mentions several issues that will need to be resolved, e.g. the hosting situation for the site. I feel that this would be an ideal thing for one of the various open source foundations to address. I.e., provide a single-source hosting environment for open source projects without needing…

https://sourcehut.org/ fits this pretty well

SourceHut is great but they still do not support[1] organization accounts. Team development, especially for relatively big projects like Vim is a pain in such environment. It's also sad they stopped publishing regular "What's cooking on SourceHut" blog posts.

[1] https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/meta.sr.ht/29

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