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Comment by sph

1 year ago

neovim is what happens when the javascript kids decide to "improve" one of the best editors ever created. The entire Lua ecosystem standing on 50 unstable plugins that provide the entire kitchen sink, yet do not even have a 1.0 version is nightmarish.

Follow any guide and either everything breaks, or you get an hodgepodge of automagic popups, stuff that autodownloads, flash messages and useless features that are completely antithetical to the slim, minimal philosophy of vim.

At least the original vim is still around, and the js kids are allergic to parens so there's an alternative.

When I was looking for an editor that supported true color themes, neovim supported them, vim didn't. That decided what I was going to use. Stability is good, but if you need a feature that's not there - stability isn't helping.

>neovim is what happens when the javascript kids decide to "improve" one of the best editors ever created

I don't think that's accurate. Now, if OTOH you said "the Lua kids" then I'd probably agree.

  • There are no Lua kids, i.e newbie programmers that start their career from Lua. The neovim Lua kids were JS kids all along, and brought their philosophy of churn over.

    • Follow up: it would be interesting to see the raw numbers of how many JS Kids have transferred over to Lua development.

    • I find this to be an interesting theory, but where is the evidence for it?

I am not a JS dev, and still prefer nvim. If you’re careful with plugin choices, you can get nice QoL features and still be stable. I can’t think of a time when I’ve had nvim crash.

You’re correct that random guides are generally garbage, but by reading plugin docs (gasp), you can generally get stuff working without much fuss.