I don’t see any actual good arguments in this post, just “vim is just fine like it is” and “neovim reimplements stuff that could be achieved through the shell and therefore it is bad”. Neovim’s project goals don’t align with the author’s idea of what vim should be like and so they decided to write an angry rant and call its devs a bunch of names.

Rewind history 25 years and replace “NeoVim” with “Vim” and “Vim” with “Vi”.

As a developer who isn’t exactly new, I would rather work with someone who uses Notepad than ever work with a colleague who writes or propagates screeds about people and tools like this.

I’m a 40 year old software developer who doesn’t know how to use vi, vim, neovim, or emacs, and I make a frankly unreasonable amount of money. Why would text editor choice possibly affect someone’s employability?

In short, NeoVim is creating a bunch of very dangerous — and in some cases — unemployable beginners who have burned NeoVim practices into their brains and muscle memory.

Wow this is just ridiculous. Or maybe it’s a strength of Neovim: it can identify developers that can’t adapt to other tools. ;D

I don’t think I know anyone who actually learned vi (and not vim) by choice except fighting some ancient box (or maybe it was so long ago they didn’t tell me, I certainly started with vi in 1998). Everyone uses nocompatible.

I am not a NeoVim user and I’m not sure I want to continue after the first paragraph…

because anyone using Vim should always disable all the defaults and begin with a clean slate in their vimrc file.

OK, this must be satire. I’m out.

Wow, that’s one of the worst gatekeeping articles I’ve seen in a while. I’m a vim user for over 20 years and made the switch to Neovim at 0.4. It’s by far my favorite vi-incarnation for daily coding. The article also doesn’t seem terrible informed, i.e. it laments the lack of vimdiff while ignoring nvim -d (same flag as vim).

The BOFH was a cautionary tale, not an aspirational one.

In other words, vi -> vim -> neovim would be a reasonable learning path, but beginners don’t do that and the NeoVim team actively recruits people to their cause without any consideration for the important of a progressive learning approach.

Wait wha? I cant use a tool because I didnt learn its ancestors? I didnt learn vim from vi, just like I am sure people forgot to take the journey of ed -> ex -> vi -> vim. Are we expected to learn emacs from TECO emacs -> gosling -> Gnu -> Xemacs -> Gnu ?

NeoVim looks in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME for its configuration files which means that it follows the ~/.config/… location convention that is now the Linux standard. I love this! I love their concern for this standard. Unfortunately, after more than two decades, no one cares because you already are maintaining your Vim configuration in a dotfiles repo and providing symbolic links.

I errr version ~/.config too so ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Also is it that terrible to have

cat ~/.config/init.vim
" I am lazy and have lots of ~/.vimrc stuff, pretend for my old self
set runtimepath^=~/.vim runtimepath+=~/.vim/after
let &packpath = &runtimepath
source ~/.vimrc

The second thing listed on NeoVim’s comparison page is the 42 different defaults from Vim. These are completely > and totally irrelevant because anyone using Vim should always disable all the defaults and begin with a clean slate in their vimrc file.

You mean the defaults that all the distributions and every vimrc file in existence has? I guess I must force new users to learn why backspace is a bit weird and how that still relates to ex?

… the biggest being full shell integration for extensibility, not supporting Lua and NodeJS plugins. NeoVim has made itself into a serious joke among those who know and use Vi/m as has been down for decades for all the right reasons. … json_decode are just silly when commands like jq exist. They even renamed viminfo to shada for nothing but vain not-invented-here reasons. And Lua and Python support? Pffff. Please. You can be glad you learned to use Vi/m correctly and without a bunch of unnecessary bloat that would directly affect your performance on every other system with Vi while diminishing your ability to actually use your most powerful tool, the shell in which Vi/m is running.

? json_decode is in vim too?

The if_perl has been dropped. Nothing screams “we are all morons” more than dropping Perl support from something that has had it for 2 decades just because you buy into the trendy Perl-hate.

I guess python or lua is bloat, but Perl is not? In some ways we should pour one out for Perl, but it is on the wane, do you care that mzscheme is also gone now?

NeoVim removed several core tools used regular by Vim users for seriously important use cases:

Maybe I am missing something?

ex - binary not installed (vim does) nvim -e ?, I bet a symlink would work too (you know how vim does this right?)

:ex - not accessible from vim command line You got me, but I guess Q is a bad key?

view - cannot run vi in read-only mode nvim -R ?

… etc etc

Again, incredibly inexperienced decisions from people who never actually learned to use Vim for anything significant in the first place. The fact that they removed :shell completely confirms they don’t value shell integration which is the basis of all of Vim’s magical power. The fact that they removed vimdiff shows none of them have ever worked on any cybersecurity project of any significance.

Ok so :shell is gone (I had to look it up, didnt miss it since tmux and or CTRL-Z and or :!), but vimdiff is still there, I would be surprised if I suddenly could not do a git merge

I kinda gave up at this point, it feels like old man yells at cloud

The author has clearly not seriously considered any use cases besides their own. They are welcome to continue using vim and loving it—there is nobody forcing them to switch and nothing to be gained by ranting about things they don’t understand. Their use case is clearly neither the new user nor the one that wants to expand to do new things. Nobody is making them migrate, and apparently they don’t want other people to have nicer or different things than they do.

I for example am writing this very comment on lobste.rs in a textarea managed with Firenvim — I have 100% of my full Neovim config, plugins and all, available as the editor backend powering this text input. Lets see the author do that with their 1970s compatible config editor version.

Vim is awesome, if you like it use it. If you like the things NeoVIM brings to the table use it. But don’t wast your time on this pointless rant.

This is satire right?

IMO posting pages from someone’s thought diary is kinda gross. If he intended this to be a public piece I’d happily rip it to shreds, but I don’t think he expected anyone besides him would read it. He’s just venting to himself.

I often struggle to understand why people don’t let others like what they want to.

Was this actually meant to be published?

I mean, it’s really an angry rant, and I don’t agree with most of the posts. The argument that you have to learn vi before you can appreciate neovim, is dumb. I’m sure it’s handy if you are often faced with environments with only vi, but a lot of users use neovim on their desktop and probably nowhere else ever, I’m sure. I am also not forcing new Linux user to start with Linux from Scratch, so they can appreciate all the convenience their favorite distribution has added.

I wonder what will happen when he discovers that VS Code is everywhere nowadays…

tell us how you really feel?

this reads just like someone’s brain threw up

then i realized we’re looking into someone’s personal zettelkasten, basically their diary

wonder what he thinks of vscode if he feels like neovim users are unemployable, 😁