I think it’s kind of crazy that vim9script is even a thing, especially when neovim has proven how much more viable lua is as a scripting language. Lua is way more beginner friendly than vimscript or vim9script, with luajit you get killer performance, lua has an awesome language server implementation, it’s a saner programming language imo and so much more going for it. There’s even transpilers to convert typescript / other languages to lua. There’s plugins written in lua today that just wouldn’t be possible in vimscript or vim9script script.
Vim9script on the other hand seems like an exploration in PL, which I’m all for generally but not in a software like vim. Like, just imagine writing and maintaining something like magit or org mode in vim9script. It’s a large complicated piece of software, you'll have to write it using without any linter, formatter or language server (at least for the foreseeable future) and your skills are not transferable to any other tool. Just the sheer probability of better plugins existing and thriving in your ecosystem drop significantly once you choose to have vim9script as the scripting language. I’m curious to see how this all pans out but I’m not optimistic.
The worst part is that it doesn't appear that existing plugins will work in vim9script. Even the syntax for commenting is different:
set number " This is a comment in vimscript
set number # This is a comment in vim9script
And to get any performance improvement, plugin authors will have to do a LOT of work that is not compatible with their existing plugins.
I for one am glad neovim exists, and I encourage people to throw a few bucks their way :)
I've avoided neovim because my current vim setup justworks™ and i trully depend on it for being productive on my job. As time goes by i really feel like i should switch based on how the two projects progress. Do you know of a resource that could hold my hand?
I've been using MacVim for 15 years; it has been pretty much solid the entire time, and I'm used to its mouse integration. When I started out, I was doing a lot of cross-platform development and there was a Windows version of Vim which behaved almost the same. It was great to have a powerful text editing experience which was pretty much the same everywhere.
I tried out NeoVim, but as far as I can tell, it seems to be terminal-only/keyboard-only? I can use Vim keyboard-only (certainly I do that all the time over ssh), but it's not my preference.
My second choice for editing behind MacVim isn't NeoVim but VSCode, but I don't use VSCode with Vim bindings because in my experience grafting Vim bindings onto any editor not Vim won't be feature complete. In a perfect world, there would be an IDE which is truly a Vim-style modal editor at its core.