The State of Vim

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Project Governance & BDFL vs Committees

  • Strong debate over “benevolent dictator for life” (BDFL) vs committees.
  • Pro‑BDFL points: someone needs to say “no” to maintain focus; unpopular decisions are easier with a respected single leader; open source isn’t a democracy and forking is always an escape hatch.
  • Anti‑BDFL points: it’s a “bad governance model” extended too long; centralization can cause fragility (e.g., single maintainer blocking progress, infra gaps).
  • Committees are criticized as either paralyzed (“no to everything”) or bloated (“yes to everything”), but others argue that good leadership and team structures can outperform hero‑centric models.
  • Competition (e.g., forks like Neovim) is seen as a healthy check on any governance model.

Vim vs Neovim

  • Many self‑described “vim nerds” report switching to Neovim for:
    • Better async support, LSP, Treesitter, and richer plugin APIs (including headless mode and RPC plugins).
    • Active ecosystem and distributions (e.g., AstroNvim, LunarVim) that provide “batteries included” IDE‑like setups.
  • Others stick with classic Vim for:
    • Stability, conservative defaults, and fewer breaking changes.
    • Simplicity and avoiding “flashy”/animated configs; some view Neovim as turning into a “blinky IDE.”
  • Some users tried Neovim, hit regressions (terminal redraw, mouse behavior, breaking updates), and reverted to Vim.
  • It’s noted that recent Vim development accelerated, possibly in response to Neovim.

Popularity, Future of Vim/Emacs, and VS Code

  • Stack Overflow survey snippets are discussed:
    • VS Code dominates; Vim and Neovim together are substantial; Emacs is a small minority.
  • Some think younger developers, trained on VS Code and similar, will reduce Vim/Emacs mindshare over time.
  • Others point out Vim/Emacs have outlived many editors and expect them (or at least vim‑mode) to persist.

Workflows & Modal Editing

  • Many use Vim keybindings everywhere: VS Code, JetBrains, Zed, terminals, even window managers.
  • Modal editing is described as a transferable “universal text input model.”
  • Some “live” inside Vim/Neovim or Emacs as their primary shell/session; others pair Vim/Neovim with tmux or use Emacs as a general computing environment.

Config, Plugins, & Scripting

  • Neovim distributions are praised for making modern setups easy but criticized for complexity and frequent breakage.
  • Some prefer minimal configs and few plugins; others like curated distros with extensive defaults.
  • Vim9 script is promoted as a big improvement over classic Vimscript and more natural for editor scripting than Lua, but skepticism remains about adding yet another language when Lua already powers a thriving ecosystem.
  • XDG base directory adoption triggers the usual “home clutter” vs “don’t change my paths” tension.