Perhaps this was mentioned the other day, but Neovim did make me think of this old chestnut from Joel Spolsky:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I realize Neovim is being characterized as an "aggressive refactor," but I'm sure that's the way Netscape thought of it as well.

tl;dr Things you should never do: rewrite the code from scratch.

haberman

With that thinking we never get Linux (NeoMinix), tmux (NeoScreen), Clang (NeoGCC), WebKit (NeoGecko), Subversion (NeoCVS), or Vim itself (NeoVi/Elvis/Stevie/etc).

raverbashing

Huummmmm no

Neovim is being sold as a VIM refactor, but apparently with no new functionality

Very different from Linux (had an aim of being a playground for new features), tmux is different from screen as Clang is different from GCC, Subversion is a totally different beast from CVS

mden

Neovim isn't a simple refactor though. It adds the ability to do many things which aren't currently possible or are extremely difficult to do with the current vim. Sometimes there is no easy way out and you have to put in the work to fix previous limitations.

guyzmo

well, if you want a re-think/re-factor of vim, you should definitely have a look at kak (https://github.com/mawww/kakoune).

It's basically trying to improve over vim, still using command/insertion modes, inverting the commands (by using movement/action instead of action/movement)… It's pretty configurable and the codebase is new.

definitely worth a try!