Ha aparecido un fork de vim llamado neovim. El motivo, según los autores, es refactorizar el viejo código C89¹ de forma que sea más fácil integrar nuevos cambios en el código base:

Over its more than 20 years of life, vim has accumulated about 300k lines of scary C89 code that very few people understand or have the guts to mess with.

Another issue, is that as the only person responsible for maintaining vim's big codebase, Bram Moolenaar has to be extra-careful before accepting patches, because once merged, the new code will be his responsibility.

These problems make it very difficult to have new features and bug fixes merged into the core. Vim just can't keep up with the development speed of its plugin ecosystem.

Bram Moolenaar no parece muy convencido:

It's going to be an awful lot of work, with the result that not all systems will be supported, new bugs introduced and what's the gain for the end user exactly?

Total refactoring is not a solution. It's much better to improve what we have. Perhaps with some small refactorings specifically aimed at making Vim work better for users.

No me parece que la idea vaya a tener mucha tracción, pero bueno, ahí está para el que le interese.

:wq