Neovim is a continuation of Vim, you can find more info here: https://neovim.io/charter/
Edit: This doesn't mean Vim is discontinued.
s/continuation/hard fork/
Neovim is a hard fork, not a continuation. Vim is still being developed by Bram and other contributors, and has a lot of the same functionality now with different API surfaces. Questionable choices by both development groups (but, IMO, mostly from the initial arrogance of the neovim developers) are increasing the gap to the point where, in a couple of years, I do not expect there to be meaningful compatibility between them.
A lot of people don’t like Vimscript, but I personally find the Lua integrations which neovim has to be harder to use because the language isn’t built around the editor, it requires bridging, and there’s a definite impedance mismatch involved.
For me, without an equivalent of `gvim`/`MacVim`, neovim is a non-starter. The OS-level integration is important, and none of the various neovim GUIs that exist are nearly as good as the original `gvim` for X or Windows or MacVim for macOS.
What did you find arrogant about the neovim developers?
Pretty much everything, including the ongoing lie that Neovim is a "continuation" of Vim.
I replied in a different comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33922783) about the async patches, which is where the whole things started. Because the patches weren’t accepted as is, they hard forked.
That requires an incredible amount of arrogance.
Neovim is not better than Vim. It is (increasingly) different. They have made different choices, some of which are interesting, some of which are baffling, and most of which are just different, although I consider the removal of GUI support to be about as arrogant as the gemini protocol stuff. There is a pernicious strain of software developer that thinks that they know better on everything and that GUIs are bad.
I felt that way in 1992 or so, despite having been exposed in 1990 to X, because it was easy to pick on Windows 3.1 and (then) Mac users. I got over it because there are things which are better, easier, and faster with GUIs than without. Not everything needs a GUI, but if you want people to use your software, leaving it in the terminal is unlikely to be a long-term success strategy.
> although I consider the removal of GUI support to be about as arrogant
They didn't just delete the GUI. They made it easy to embed neovim and as a result there are several GUI frontends now. Seems like a good call - gvim is not a great gui so why keep it around rather than making it easy for gui people to make good ones against an api? There are several active guis right now: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects#gui
None of the ones that support macOS are good, and all of them that don’t have explicit macOS support are all awful.
Given the choice, I can either:
1. Hate every day of working with the substandard state of neovim GUIs
2. Hate every day of working with neovim remediated by a terminal
3. Switch to Emacs
4. Switch to VS Code
or
5. Keep using MacVim, because it just works
I try each of the various active neovim GUIs every few months. Usually, I end up noping out of each one with just trying to edit a single file. For ones that have stuck for a day or two, I end up noping out of them because they are missing key OS integrations or are sluggish or have made decisions to act more like an IDE (Vimr) that result in a UI that’s less flexible than gvim or MacVim itself.
You say that gvim isn’t a great GUI, but that’s a subjective — and IMO wrong — opinion. It is vim. It doesn’t try to be anything but vim. It doesn’t try to add IDE frippery (because you can implement all of that with vim plugins) or switch to an entirely different plugin system where you can’t use any of your existing configuration (Oni2).
gvim — and MacVim — are great GUIs for being separate non-terminal-bound views on vim. There’s not a single neovim GUI that has reached that level, and most of them get abandoned because, in the end, no one on the neovim ecosystem cares because the core project doesn't care.
VimR is very good; I've been using it before it started using Neovim as the core [1].