Vision

Rustvim continues the tradition of Vim while incrementally moving editor internals to Rust. The migration aims to preserve established editing behavior and plugin interfaces while improving the implementation’s maintainability.

Goals

Compatible. Maintainable. Extensible.

• Retain the character of Vim—fast, versatile, quasi-minimal.
• Move implementation logic into safe Rust, with small, explicit C interfaces.
• Validate migrated components against existing editor behavior.
• Enable new contributors, remove barriers to entry.
• Create rustvim book and mdbook documentation of how the editor works and how it can be improved.
• Unblock plugin authors.
• Deliver a first-class Lua interface, as an alternative to Vimscript.
• Favor composability (long-term thinking) instead of new, incompatible concepts (short-term thinking).
• Follow relevant upstream editor development.
• Optimize “out of the box”, for new users but especially regular users.
• Deliver a consistent cross-platform experience, targeting all libuv-supported platforms.
• In matters of taste/ambiguity, favor tradition/compatibility…
• …but prefer usability if the benefits are extreme.
• Add support for the Vim9script

Non-goals

• Turn Vim into an IDE
• Limit third-party applications (such as IDEs!) built with Rustvim
• Deprecate Vimscript
• Conform to POSIX vi

Project management

• Development: Rustvim on GitHub
• Contributing: CONTRIBUTING.md