Vim is old. Really old.

Vim's codebase is terrible, seriously. It has 300.000+ lines of scary & platform-specific code, written in C89.

In the end, everything is Bram Moolenaar's responsibility, and it is possible to see that on GitHub:

Even though there are a lot of contributors and a great community behind it, every patch is applied by him.

Bram was interviewed in 2004, and one of the questions was:

"How can the community ensure that the Vim project succeeds for the foreseeable future?"

His answer was short and direct: "Keep me alive."

I'm not writing these things to complain about Vim, but because I love it. And as a passionate user, I should be always worried about its future.

neovim comes with some key principles:

Aggressively refactor source code

Replace platform-specific code with libuv

Provide a new Plugin architecture (asynchronous and language independent interface)

True color support

Continue the Vim tradition of backwards compatibility, with few exceptions

And above all, it is built for users who want the good parts of Vim, and more.

It fixes literally every issue i have with Vim, the plugin API, the codebase and the BDFL.

If you use plugins for code completion, linting, or anything that frustrates you when your Vim freezes, you understand how important is to have remote and asynchronous plugins (neomake, deoplete, etc..).

You can even run a terminal emulator in a Vim buffer with it. It is just amazing.

People usually get worried about the migration process from Vim to Nvim (I was), but it is extremely simple and totally worth it. Your .vimrc should be ready to go with neovim, and nothing more than a move or copy will be needed.

"neovim is the future of vim, and you should go for it asap"

Summarizing: https://twitter.com/VimLinks/status/723437779376443392