the lineage of text editors that leads all the way up to neovim is actually kind of overwhelming to think about. it’s incredible that over 50 years of iterative improvement, interrupted occasionally by burning the whole codebase down and starting from scratch, has resulted in what we have now

vim is A Lot and it’s also very unintuitive - and neovim is even moreso - but it makes a lot of sense to me that that would be the case given how long these editors and their ancestors have been around, and how many decades’ worth of quirks they’ve picked up. but I think that also kind of explains how they’ve become such incredibly powerful and flexible tools

this is a weird comparison but it reminds me of the incredibly intricate family tree of space station 13 codebases - all taking influence from each other, reverse-engineering each other, or outright stealing each other’s code (with or without permission) resulting in an unbelievably complicated ecosystem of ideas

the open source world seems like absolute chaos to me - but it’s a kind of chaos that, if you leave it alone for long enough, sometimes creates incredibly refined tools that are very difficult to configure and use but unbelievably good at what they do

@brettm oh wow this looks pretty cool! it looks like regular vim, until all of a sudden they do some commands that feel like they belong to a vim in an alternate universe lol

I’ve been skimming a little bit about structural regular expressions and they seem like they’d be very powerful to have in an editor like vim