charter.html

---
layout: default
title: About
---

{% include nav.html active='About' %}

<div class="container">

<h1>Project Charter</h1>

<p>Neovim is not a rewrite of Vim; it is a refactor (and sometimes redactor) in
the tradition of Vim which itself derives from <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevie_%28text_editor%29">Stevie</a>.</p>

<p>Neovim is a continuation and extension of Vim. Many rewrites, clones,
emulators and imitators exist; some are very clever; none are Vim. Neovim
strives to be a superset of Vim, notwithstanding some intentionally removed
misfeatures; thus insofar as one accepts those few and carefully-considered
excisions, Neovim <em>is</em> Vim. The project is built for users who want the good
parts of Vim, without compromise, plus some new good parts.</p>

<p>The design of Neovim is informed by established industry principles such as
modularity, isolation, well-defined interfaces, in order to:</p>

<ul>
    <li> Simplify maintenance and comprehension</li>
    <li> Encourage contributions, scale development work</li>
    <li> Enable new applications (remote plugins, integrations) and frontends (UIs)</li>
</ul>

<p>This purpose of this charter is to clarify priorities and to guide
decisions.</p>

<h2>Project Goals</h2>

<ul>
    <li> Leverage existing and ongoing Vim development development</li>
    <li> Maintain feature parity with Vim and avoid regressions</li>
    <li> Continue the Vim tradition of backwards compatibility</li>
    <li> Keep the core small and fast</li>
    <li> Make the core more extensible</li>
    <li> Target all platforms supported by libuv</li>
    <li> Optimize "out of the box", for new users but especially regular users</li>
    <li> Delegate functionality to plugins, but preserve the utility of the nvim core</li>
    <li> Ship Luajit as first-class scripting alternative</li>
</ul>

<h2>Project Non-Goals</h2>

<ul>
    <li> Turn Vim into an IDE</li>
    <li> Limit applications (such as IDEs) built with Neovim</li>
    <li> Deprecate VimL</li>
</ul>

<h2>Guiding Principles</h2>

<ul>
    <li> <strong>Do Not Regress From Origin</strong></li>
    <li> Decide outcomes by weighing cost and benefit</li>
    <li> Use automation to solve problems</li>
    <li> Enable new contributors: remove barriers to entry</li>
    <li> Prefer usability over tradition if the benefit greatly outweighs the cost</li>
    <li> In matters of taste or ambiguity, favor tradition/compatibility</li>
    <li> Unblock contributors and plugin authors; allow progress</li>
    <li> Give usability a chance</li>
</ul>

</div>