why is neovim such a sad thing?

hello Paolo,

On Thu, Mar 27, 2025 at 03:01:54AM +0000, Paolo Bolzoni wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Mar 2025 at 12:37, Marc Chantreux <mc@unistra.fr> wrote:
> > Cool! this way you have something much simpler than the smarttabs
> > plugin and you learned stuff in the process.
> >
> > that's what vim once was and should remain and that's the reason I
> > really see neovim as a very sad thing that happenned to our community.
>
> Can you elaborate? I always thought that in addition of its age,
> projects like neovim the proof how the vim idea is good.

I wish I had time to elaborate right now but I don't (I will at some point
because I more or less promise a talk at a local tech conference). But
let's try to pitch it a very concise way.

As introduction, I have to say I love the unix and convivialist
cultures: we help each others to make things possible with the most
simple, clean and maintainable way so we could share, explain, maintain,
drop easily.

* I started using vi (vim among other implementations) in the 90. At
this time it wasn't clear to me wich one was the best because I was
learning the very basics anyway. What hooked me is the way vi was
concise and consistent, yet powerful. For that and because it was
considered as "the default unix editor" at the time, I chose vi
then vim over emacs.
* When I started to master the basics, I became exigeant so I started to
tweak my .vimrc more and more. I asked so many questions on this list
and the irc channel and I realized two things that helped me to be so
confortable not only with vim but with the whole unix system as an
IDE: vi was just a visual ed so:
* so the langage you use to extend is the one you use every day.
* the concepts you use are available in unix at large including the
regexp, substitution syntax, pipes and filters
(https://github.com/eiro/talk-acme-changed-my-life).
then you realize sed works the same, then you realize that awk is a
verbose sed with line split and math, then you realize sometimes
you need both together + more "scripting langages" abilities and you
discover perl, then you discover perl regexps and PCRE and you
realize that regexps are so much more than what you previously
thought and you "nnoremap / /\v" (discovering \M in the process).
you *can't* waste your time trying to tune something this way
because you just practice the vim as a window to an amazing world
with a very rich culture
See https://git.unistra.fr/mc/dot/-/blob/main/vim/r/buffer_navigation.vim
* the first line is something I wrote once and forget forever
* all the others are made of things I use all the time

Of course, it is also a social journey: meet people, share about
problems and Ideas …

I wasn't aware of how vim will be the key to the whole unix culture when
I started my journey and I really think neovim put a distance to this
world using lua as default langage and insisting on plugins.

neovim users are actually emacs+viper users that are ignoring
themselves (and most of the time terrible vim users). there was no point
to split a community, its plugin ecosystem, its support effort,
its culture (to be honnest: yes, at some point there
were one good reason: async which only was added in vim8 but nowadays
I chat with many neovim users but none of them were able to show me
*one* thing I can envy mostly because vim already does it another way).

I'm really sorry I have no time to push more details and examples here
and I'll come back here to share more materials when it will be ready.

regards

--
Marc Chantreux
Pôle CESAR (Calcul et services avancés à la recherche)
Université de Strasbourg
14 rue René Descartes,
BP 80010, 67084 STRASBOURG CEDEX
03.68.85.60.79

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