According to the feature-set, this is basically NeoVIM.

* Separation into front-end and back-end: NeoVIM does this. The UI uses the same interface a plugin does.

* Asynchronous operations: NeoVIM uses libuv to do this (same asynchronous C++ lib as NodeJS).

* Plug-ins over scripting: Yup, NeoVIM does this, as well as dropping vimscript (although it will compile vimscript into Lua for you).

* JSON: NeoVIM uses msgpack, which is significantly less overhead than JSON, but structure compatible.

The two other features listed are Rust and rope-structures, which are implimentation specifics that don't affect users or plugin writers at all.

Edit: The more the merrier! And it's good to see more projects using Rust, but I don't see this as a strong need. See https://github.com/rogual/neovim-dot-app for a nice native Mac UI plugin/client for neovim.

NeoVIM is great, and obviously it has been inspiration. I think it remains to be seen whether NeoVIM can deliver an experience that feels like a modern editor. My experience is that projects which attempt to layer a GUI on top of an existing, mature console UI end up leaking bits of the underlying UI. I'm thinking mostly of the various TeX shells here.

A large part of my motivation for starting this project is to explore how suitable Rust is for this kind of work. End users shouldn't have to care, they should judge it strictly by the quality of what it delivers. But I'm hoping this project will be interesting to Rust programmers for a number of reasons.

I don't understand why people need a GUI to edit text. And while I donate to the NeoVIM project, I don't really like that they are increasing incompatibility with Vim in order to create a GUI layer. It also bothers me that they didn't just use the GPLv2 (because I find the dual Vim-Apache licensing troubling).

Smooth scrolling alone makes me often opt for not-Emacs (running plain Emacs in OS X). I've tried several solutions to solve this from googling, never found anything that was effective.

As a mouse user as well, sometimes selecting text with my mouse/positioning with mouse works fast, and I've always found text editors to not really be too great at letting me click accurately between characters.

Also, if you get into more IDE-y features, not having your "popup"s be overlayed colored text is usually a win for aesthetics. And hey, if I'm staring at something 8 hours a day, having it be pretty is nice right?