I think I will use vim-classic and possibly contribute to it. Not because of AI, but because I actually want to use Vim over say something like Neovim* and I actually like vimscript, which imo didn't need the development of vim9script to improve it.
Regarding why not Neovim, I think it's because a large section of the community want to create more complex TUI elements or replicate GUI interfaces and make it more like VS Code. I use Vim for the "vim way" not because it's in a terminal or it's not bloated like some other editors.
I see this contradiction all the time. Windows is a mess but there are lots of examples of rock solid, performant applications that have been developed and maintained over decades. Everything is one, also one that springs to mind which is much more performant compared to Linux alternatives is WinMerge.
If I install Ubuntu 25.10, I can't get camera effects (blurred background and so on) to work in Meet because hardware compositing (or something, I'm not entirely clear on the details[0][1]) doesn't work properly on the open Nvidia driver on Wayland. Wait I thought this was all supposed to be the future?
Ratpoison was always my favourite tiling window manager. There's also a fork called sdorfehs[0] which seems to still be maintained and has a bunch of minor improvements here and there.
Slightly off-topic, but a little while back someone shared an article with a screenshot of a lot of famous developers desktops including Kernighan, Ritchie, Pike, Rasmus Lerdorf and a load of others (they are just the ones that come to mind). One of things I remember was the use of Windows for some historical Unix person and also one of them liking non-monospaced fonts. Can anyone find this link? Thanks in advance!
Fails to mention my favourite text editor, Sublime Text which has an optional Vim mode built in (Vintage). I personally am using NeoVintageous[0] which allows you to run various ex commands and shell commands, as well as incorporating features from popular plugins such as vim-surround.
Sublime is excellent precisely because it has such excellent non-modal hotkeys out of the box.
I swear, I spent over a year training vim. I still wasn't as quick as I was after a week of sublime. It's pretty much the only proprietary software I shill for.
I also find Sublime Text to have the most well-designed non-Vim keybindings I’ve used. Having used Vim for a decade before trying Sublime, I initially underestimated how well it works even without a Vim plugin.
Two of my favorite tricks: (i) Search in file (Cmd-F), turn on regex mode if it’s not already on (Cmd-Opt-R), search for a pattern (with regex syntax highlighting!), and press Opt-Enter. This places one cursor / selection at every regexp match.(ii) Press Cmd-R to get a list of classes/functions in the file, and navigate with arrow keys (or type to search). Performs roughly the same function as I used code folding for in Vim or imenu for in Emacs. (Sublime also has code folding, but I don’t like the implementation much.)
Regarding why not Neovim, I think it's because a large section of the community want to create more complex TUI elements or replicate GUI interfaces and make it more like VS Code. I use Vim for the "vim way" not because it's in a terminal or it's not bloated like some other editors.