Problem with distributions is as the contributions decrease they start becoming abandonware with time.
Leaving you with with vim and having to work through the configuration hell on the long term for yourself.
>>Again, Neovim gives you choices: you can configure and tweak it to your heart’s content
Trust me this is negative thing, not exactly something most programmers want. Most programmers don't enjoy configuring their IDE/Editors as a full time project together with your regular day job.
Ah, this old chestnut.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but that audience is pretty small, and the number of people who text edit a lot that a) need to float between machines frequently AND b) don't have enough access to install what they want is even smaller.
Even that is a fairly new development. For a very time long people where saying exactly that about vim. I'm not _that_ old, and I was told early in my career not to get too dependent on either vim or the GNU tools since they probably won't be installed on most systems you connect to.
Yeah, that’s not going to happen.
It’s cool to have choices, but you wouldn’t be the first person to think a new editor is going to replace Vim/Neovim. Vim is literally on every Unix/Linux server; every sysadmin can count on it being there.
I’ve been super impressed with the progress of Neovim and the team behind it. It’s only at version 0.8 but they’ve done some amazing things already.
I expect Neovim will get to the “batteries included” stage with Treesitter and LSP; it’s not far from there right now. And there are several Neovim distributions (LunarVim, Nvchad, etc.) that have all of the bells and whistles included. Helix sounds like it’s similar to one of these Neovim distributions.
Again, Neovim gives you choices: you can configure and tweak it to your heart’s content if you want or you can get something pre-configured with all the goodies installed and configured. Or you can use it headless from a different frontend (VS Code, browser, etc.) if that’s what’s needed.
Perhaps the best thing about Neovim is how great it is for both longtime Vim/Vi users and brand new users who are ready to graduate from Notepad and Nano.