I would like to start by saying that I admire your work on Vim, I've been using it for quite some time now and I really enjoy using Vim every day.
There's a new project that is called Neovim that seeks to refactor and modernize the codebase, I was interested in knowing what your opinion is on this project? I think many are curious about what you think too.
Please let us know. Thanks for Vim. :)
http://neovim.org/
https://github.com/neovim/neovim
Regards,
Diego
While I agree that there are a couple of things in vim which are annoying, I /think/ (correct me if I'm wrong) Bram was primarily addressing another issue: Total vs Partial refactoring.
In my opinion total refactoring is rarely a good idea. The more time and effort went into a project, the riskier it gets. So many years of usage experience went into vim. This means the existing code addresses a vast number of corner cases which crept up during the years. Total refactoring risks an insane amount of regressions.
Partial refactoring is harder (depending on the case, a *lot* harder) and will take longer but is not risking as much. And not to forget, has a chance to get merged into the mainline code.
The "total refactoring path" is something that pains a lot of the open-source world. It happens so often that an existing project is forked by people who intend to re-write it in a better way. Their intentions are noble. But only few of them succeed.
that's why Bram wants a test for every patch ;)
I don't have the expertise to say which path would be the best for neovim, but at least tests should make refactoring a lot easier. I'm more worried about refactoring the code and, at the same time, change / add stuff (like the new plugin system)
> So in
> addition to the refactoring I think that a more flexible development
> model that is not dependent on just one person and an antiquated
> 'patches' system could definitely improve things.
That, however, is something that could be done without changing a line of code, right?
Sorry.