1. The code was reformatted because Vim's codebase is a mess. It mixes tabs and spaces willy-nilly. It uses different indentation rules in different parts of files. These issues may seem cosmetic, but they make the code harder to follow and increase the likelihood of bugs. Indentation can be especially misleading when control flow lacks braces (a common occurrence in Vim). The change didn't require much effort and it made it easier for people to contribute to Neovim.
2. Actually, quite a bit of Vim's old platform-specific code is broken. It's just that nobody uses an SGI IRIS or Amiga, so nobody complains about it. In some cases, Neovim removed ifdef'd code that could never possibly be included[1].
3. People have donated less than $40k to Neovim. That's not even the salary of a single developer for the 8 months it's been around. The contributors aren't in it for the money. They simply want to build a great editor.
4. A very shiny website? It's just static pages hosted on Github. If you look at the commit history[2], you can see it's insignificant compared to work done on the Neovim codebase.
5. Nothing? There's an entire repository of working code. Right now you can clone Neovim, compile it, and it will run almost all Vim plugins without issue. The team is very conservative about declaring software stable. They may not have a tagged release, but to call the existing work "nothing" is unreasonable. It's at least as stable as Atom.
You also neglected to mention all the other work done on Neovim, such as replacing ad-hoc cross-platform compatibility and event handling with libuv. Then there's the improved plugin APIs which allow features that aren't possible in Vim.[3] And of course, plugins can be written in any language. No more VimL shims needed.
Lastly: Disparaging? Disrespectful? It's hard to find any criticism the Neovim contributors have made towards Bram or Vim. They like Bram. They like Vim. Thiago tried to contribute to Vim multiple times, but was discouraged or ignored.[4][5] Instead of complaining or giving up, he and the other contributors are trying to improve the editor and the community around it. There's no malice or greed involved.
1. https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/814
2. https://github.com/neovim/neovim.github.io/
3. https://github.com/benekastah/neomake
4. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/vim_dev/QF7Bzh1YABU/02-YGr7_...
5. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/vim_dev/65jjGqS1_VQ/fFiFrrIB...
Easy compile? (I'm at work and no git clone/compiling here!) Might try later on tonight.
I recently compiled it on CentOS 5 and had to build my own cmake.
Neovim is an emo-fork created by a frustrated little princess. Nothing more, nothing less.
There's a lot of work to do on Vim itself; forking it and building a completely incompatible code base is not going to help in any way.
Natively supporting Lua/LuaJIT and Python in writing asynchronous plugins, this alone is worth the wait. I am willing to give them A LOT MORE than 8 months if they can pull just this single feature off.
The request for Python integration has been sitting at the top of Vim's voting list for many years. It must be a very very difficult task, otherwise it could be done years ago. http://www.vim.org/sponsor/vote_results.php/
Other than the new plugin infrastructure, Neovim's GUI and embedding systems will be awesome. Anyway, I applaud people who explore and try to make progress (like from Vi to Vim, a natural process). In the mean time, I am happily using Vim which is both extremely powerful and stable.
TL,DR; I can wait.
They've done even more than that. They have gone to great lengths to be helpful. For example, tarruda created an issue on our own issue tracker to let us know they updated their python plugin architecture so that we could fix our Neovim plugin. He didn't have to do this.
https://github.com/Floobits/floobits-neovim/issues/10
tarruda has shown himself to be a very productive engineer and a great steward of a growing Neovim community.
Our experience with Neovim and Vim has been night and day. The reality is that with Neovim you can build plugins that do more than you can with vim, painlessly. I don't really want it to be a vim versus neovim thing, but Bram strikes me as someone who at the very least doesn't understand Neovim's goals. I certainly hope that Neovim's changes are not backported into vim, Neovim is much more open about contributions whereas with vim there's a single gatekeeper with limited time to address big changes.
I use it full-time on supported platforms (everything except Windows), but breaking changes will require occasional reconfiguration, recompilation, or remorse.
Even if they had done JUST that and the deprecation of old code, it would be MORE than enough.
I've been tracking the neovim repo for a while, and my feeling is that they could have easily made a couple of releases with stability matching some other notable projects, but they have intentionally chosen to be conservative and wait.
If you want an example of one area where there has been work and improvement, check out the Wiki page on the updated clipboard integration: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Python-plugins,-clipbo... . Yeah, it's different, and not yet as capable as Vim's built-in clipboard integration. But if they are headed toward a goal of more generalized integration points, then this is a strong step in the right direction.
Joel Spolksy Things You Should Never Do Part 1 http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Darmesh Shah How To Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite Without Losing Your Sanity (a response to essay #1 13 years later) http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/97052/How-To-Survive-a-...
It's not always cut and dry when you should start over, but if you are make sure you are doing it in a way that starts presenting customer/user value ASAP.
In 8 months, here's what NeoVim has done:
1) Reformatted all the code.
2) Deleted a lot of working, old code.
3) Raised a good chunk of cash.
4) Published a very shiny website.
5) Released nothing.
There's nothing wrong with simplifying a code base, but if you run around trying to do that independent of any reasonable technical direction, you're just making noise.
Given that NeoVim's technical direction is extremely poorly considered (while also disparaging Bram's work), I can't help but think highly of Bram for being polite -- at all -- to such a disrespectful fork.