While true, many of those OSes are not updated anymore. So good old Vim (4, 5, 6, 7) will serve them just fine. More than that, several of them (Amiga, BeOS, etc.) run on underpowered machines so the latest and greatest Vim updates won't run on them anyway. We could say that they're well served by Vim 5, for example.

In your concrete example of a feature being removed, Neovim is actually removing a misfeature: the interactive ex mode, not the command line ex mode. The feature they're removing is akin to: http://xkcd.com/1172/.

I use ex maybe once a year, when $TERM is screwed up or latency is terrible, but to me removing it is a red flag that says the NeoVim folks don't really grok vi.

This was my initial take, but all that's really being removed is the ability to switch between ex mode and visual mode - to which my objection is substantially weaker (to the point that code clarity and separation of concerns are probably more important).

I'm not aware of any vim developer that uses the ex mode, to be honest. Simplicity is a feature, and when something like ex mode is bloating the code, the best option is to remove it. There are other better ways to script neovim.

Hi! I am a developer who uses ex mode from time to time. Now you're aware of one.

I objected when I thought they were removing all support for ex; as it turns out, they're only removing support for switching between visual mode and ex mode - making them two separate front-ends. That's not a problem.

This has been discussed before and several people said they use ex for scripting (with pipes). However, NeoVim is not removing that, only the UI for ex mode.