tl;dr This was a fun little breakable toy, never completed, rather insane in its approach, and long abandoned. I found my editor that is better than Vim that I was looking for: Spacemacs.

Void

A fearless modern text editor in the spirit of Vim

Nota Bene

This project is still in early development!

What?

A text editor that is not afraid to break compatibility with Vim, but is fundamentally inspired by it and dedicated to the spirit of Vim.

Why?

Vim is a great text editor. To my mind, it is the great text editor. Even if Void goes much farther than I anticipate, it will never reach the greatness of Vim.

That being said, there are things about Vim that really bother me. I say that not as a hater, but as someone who has deeply dedicated himself to using Vim for everything.

NeoVim is an exciting project. I truly hope and believe that it is the Vim of the future. However, while it is dropping a lot of crufty old Vi compatibility, it is still trying to be Vim (for the twenty-first century). I want to build something that loves on Vim without being afraid to break compatibility with it.

Almost any significant editor or IDE has a Vi or Vim mode. However, at the points that the editor diverges from Vi or Vim, it does so for the underlying conceptual model of that editor, which is different than that of Vim. I want to create something that diverges from Vim only because it loves Vim, something that when it diverges from Vim, still feels Vim-like.

What's with the name?

Void is derived from "Vim-oid", that is, it is a Vim-like text editor.

Goals

• Honor the inherent conflict of interest between command-mode and a scripting language. Vi is fundamentally modal; I believe that there needs to be a modal distinction drawn between wanting to dash off quick commands or while working or even do some simple configuration, and doing some serious scripting such as implementing a whole plugin.
• Bind keys to the underlying API rather than mapping them to other keys.
• Default some keys to more useful default mappings, as many Vim users are already doing (CTRL-a and CTRL-c and possibly CTRL-v should follow CUA standards; use ; rather than : to enter command mode; TAB and SHIFT-TAB should indent and de-indent...)
• Integrate brilliant ideas from plugins that really should be canonical into the core, particularly many of those by the great @tpope such as Surround and Fugitive (a Git wrapper so awesome, it should be illegal in everyone's text editor). One of the things that makes Tim Pope great is that his plugins make you think, "This feels so native and good, I can't believe it's not part of the core Vim."
• Run my shell sessions within my editor, instead of my editor within my shell, so I can use all of Vim's slick Window and Tab navigation commands seamlessly rather than having to deal with two sets of tabs and two sets of commands (or mouse clicks) such as what happens when Vim is hosted in another editor
• Make use of GUI to increase usability
• Improve searchability of documentation
• Reduce number of options/center configurability more solidly around filetypes

Contributing

I would love to see pull requests, but I recommend that if you are implementing a new feature you submit an issue first so we can discuss the new feature, even if the "new" feature is a Vim feature, because I do not intend to indiscriminately accept all Vim features into Void. That being said, please contribute!

Installing

There is an .msi available for installing on Windows as an artifact of the latest AppVeyor build. Automated installs are not available for other platforms at this time.

Disclaimer

And yes, I know...