Ask HN: Is Vim Dead? (2024)

I find this type of question a little funny. What do you mean by “dead” and who’s “everyone”?

Vim will likely be alive for decades to come for sysadmins editing files in /etc over ssh.

It might be “dead” for the new languages with a small community and nobody interested in adding support for vim…

So, it might be dead for some people and not for others.

At the end of the day I usually pick an editor that the language I’m gonna be writing has good support for.

Sublime for C, vscode for JS/TS, and jetbrains for golang

There have been six releases of Vim _this week_. So, no, Vim is not "dead".

https://github.com/vim/vim/tags

I sure hope mainline Vim isn't dead. I keep trying NeoVim but I prefer using Vim in a GUI and no NeoVim GUI I've found has the level of polish that MacVim [1] has. VimR [2] comes close but keep finding myself going back to MacVim.

[1] https://macvim.org/[2] https://github.com/qvacua/vimr

For modifying text or configs on a remote machine? No. I'm still using vim for those tasks until neovim somehow becomes standard on servers.

I've never really used it for any kind of serious programming as trying to twist a modal text editor into an IDE by propping it up with all sorts of plugins cost me so much time that I just abandoned that thought.

I just use the usual IDEs for their respective languages (pycharm for python, intellij for Java, visual studio for C#/dotnet, etc).

However, I am giving the helix editor a go for programming since I still like vim movements and while helix has their own set of movement keys, it's pretty nice. It also has LSP built-in but I found it way easier to setup for programming than vim/nvim.

As long as Vim is installed on systems by default it will keep being used for quick edits.NeoVim is popular but by a different group: people who use Vim as their main editor and want to customize it.

NeoVim will probably outlast Vim but that day is not in the foreseeable future imho.

Probably. NeoVim started off as a peaceful project: “Hey Bram, mind if we refactor the code a little bit to make it more maintainable, and add async to the slow things?”

And Bram fervently rejected that, so Vim was forked. At this point, why would anyone want to maintain Vim?

nVim has interesting ideas, but it doesn't yet have the level of stability that I require in my daily driver text editor. I have colleagues that heavily use nVim and note that it crashes occasionally. While you can make pretty much anything crash, there's a watermark of bullet-resistance I expect, as it were.

Also... Why is this post flagged? Did someone merely dislike the title? it's a decent question IMO.

That's a lot of FUD. Look at the commit log of vim.As alive as ever.Capable hands took over when Bram passed away.

I'm sticking with vim, neovim doesn't offer anything of value to me since I don't want to use Lua, treesitter or lsp, and it takes away things I appreciate (gvim, stability).