What does HackerNews think of vim?

> When use a browser as an editor

thats the problem. You should never be doing that. You should be using an editor, as an editor. The confusion is understandable though, as in general editors [1] aren't [2] widely [3] available [4] for [5] people to use.

1. https://github.com/vim/vim

2. https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs

3. https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor

4. https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus

5. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix

I just checked the repo[0], and it says Bram has authored 95% of all commits to Vim. To say "the community owns Vim" when they've done ~5% of the work reminds me of group projects in school where one person does all the work and everyone else claims credit.

[0] https://github.com/vim/vim

Neovim definitely has significant market share, you can compare Github stars as one statistic to consider:

https://github.com/vim/vim - 20k https://github.com/neovim/neovim - 36.5k

This is in some part due to the fact that neovim has been on Github longer, but it's still a a major indicator.

Neovim has many benefits over Vim, and has been applying pressure on Vim for years to improve its own development and codebase. Nvim has first class support for Lua outside of Vimscript, which has enabled a lot of people to write more powerful plugins. A lot of NVim's featureset has been copied into Vim over the years (one of my favorites is the hover window, which has allowed IDE like support for code references/comments/source). Supposedly, Nvim's codebase is significantly easier to maintain and contribute to, due to the nature of having a community of contributors that built it from ground up, as opposed to one primary developer working on Vim.

The parity has reduced over the years, but Nvim has been significantly ahead in pushing new features and active development over Vim resting on its laurels.

Maintainer, not maintainers. If you look at the vim repo, https://github.com/vim/vim, essentially all commits are from the same person. Encouraging contributions and splitting maintenance between multiple people was one of the key factors when forking neovim. IIRC neovim was a result of Bram, the vim creator, refusing a PR for async plugins. Functionality that is today regarded as extremely important.

So that's why it got flagged off the front page so quickly. That was a while ago, but it's probably relevant that https://github.com/vim/vim was last updated within the last 24 hrs, so TFA which is also less than a day old is probably news and probably shouldn't have been flagged.