[brhsagain]

Back when I was building an IDE with a custom text editor, I initially used embedded Neovim thinking I would get the entire vim feature set out of the box for free. Unfortunately this became a never ending source of bugs. I think the fundamental problem was that my application was structured like a game with a main loop in a single thread, and Neovim turned text editing into an async operation, where I would have a separate thread reading events from Neovim and then trying to safely update the global buffer.

Also, I was constantly fighting/reverse engineering Neovim to get the granular level of control over behavior that I needed for a seamless integration. It’s just a type of programming that’s extremely frustrating and not fun.

In the end I implemented custom vim emulation from scratch and surprisingly it wasn’t that hard to get the “20% of features that people actually use 80% of the time,” except it’s more like 5% and 95%, and in exchange I could own the whole stack instead of depending on a third party black box. Never been happier to delete a whole subsystem of code in my life.