It seems a bit ridiculous to dismiss reunification when you don't even know what kind of compromises might be made to make it happen.
On the other hand, vim and neovim are almost the same thing, and wherever they diverge, it is always to the detriment of vim. I would not be very optimistic for the future of vim considering that nobody uses vim9script and that alone is quite the massive baggage to maintain, an entirely separate, new programming language? one that is used by.. no one? 99% of extension developers either use the old vimscript or lua, and neovim's lua base has significantly grown to the point where we can imagine a future that has no vimscript.
Where will they find people willing to continue working on vim's code base when it has this kind of really big, really useless baggage? and if they were to cut it out of the code base, would it still be vim? I respect Bram for his contribution to open source, and vim is one of my favorite, most used software, but his decisions in the past few years have been extremely poor and were not friendly toward the possibility of vim being community maintained.
They are quite different at this point and personally I prefer vim over neovim. I've never gotten NeoVim to work satisfactorily. I've had issues with the async setup where the backend and frontend start having issues with each other or lag. So on. Personally I find vim to be a lot simpler to work with and MacVim in particular to just be a perfect GUI for me.
Of course YMMV. The point being is that there are a many of us that prefer normal Vim over the NeoVim work. That's okay. Its also okay that others prefer NeoVim over Vim. There is nothing wrong with that. What there is something wrong with is the way that many NeoVim people are reacting to this.
the same place where neovim found its developers. if one group of people can organize themselves to maintain and develop their version of vim. so can another. i don't know how many contributors vim has, but i am sure they can figure out how to move forward. finding new leadership can be difficult when there is no clear candidate, but if the contributors had not wanted to work on vim they would not have been there in the first place.
Bram, for 98% of the commits/lines, plus some statistical noise.
it feels to me that not changing vim would be what bram would have wanted. any new developments may as well happen in neovim.
of course anyone who disagrees or doesn't like where neovim is heading may fork vim and make their own version of it.
Well, they were making a wrong, but also totally unrelated to the Vim/Bram situation comparison then.
This is not a huge multinational company with tens of thousands of employees, hundreds of billions in cash, hundreds of millions of users, a strong product lineup, and a strong C-level team, who has been preparing for 2 years for its CEO eventual demise, complete with another person taking his CEO role way before that happened.
As Apple was at the time of Job's passing.
This is a FOSS software project, strongly associated and mostly solely written almost predominantly by a single person [1], with another fork that has a vibrant community and more modern features.
[1] Bram has 16,515 commits, the next biggest contributor has 68 times less commits. Or, 1/50th lines added. And it goes downhill from there, with the rest of the contributors added together being 1/50th Bram's contribution as well.
Vim is a marquee project, tons of hackers will want to contribute because it's cool or because they want to have that name on their CV.
It's one thing to contribute a couple of PRs/patches, a very different thing to spend a large part of your free time on the project for years (which is what Bram did to make vim what it is).
These projects are no joke and a few hurray contributors not lasting more than a couple of months won't cut it.
Those same contributors that remained on vim instead of neovim didn't put much effort into vim9 ecosystem either. I can't imagine them being willing to maintain all of vim's baggage when literally nobody writes vim9script. Classic vimmers tend to stick to the old vimscript.
As you said, contributing a few patches to classic vim is one thing, but becoming an actual maintainer of the behemoth that comes with a ton of useless baggage is a whole another thing. Maintaining a programming language no one uses.. sisyphus would be proud.
Looking at the commit history, vim was largely a one-man show, I'm a bit skeptical about that changing basically overnight.
Related discussion: https://github.com/vim/vim/issues/1554
“Taken at face value by most modern users of Git, the commit history does not accurately reflect the contributions to the code-base”.