Explain how macvim differs from vanilla vim

[antoine1fr]

I couldn't find anywhere (README, website, FAQ) what macvim is about and how it relates to the official Vim project.

Is your feature request related something that is currently hard to do? Please describe. It is hard to understand what macvim is. The website only mentions "Vim - the text editor - for macOS", which is confusing given that 1) Vim already ships with macOS and 2) there already is a Homebrew recipe for Vim.

Describe the solution you'd like I would like a concise description of the project to be added, at least in the README.

Describe alternatives you've considered N/A

Additional context N/A

[ychin]

I’ll update the README or the website to explain this. The status of our README is pretty bad so it deserves some clean up.

But basically MacVim is a code fork of Avon (with regular updates) that provides a GUI for Vim on macOS that integrates native OS features. The standard Vim distribution doesn’t really have a functional gVim for macOS which was the reason this project was started (not by me as I inherited this project).

If you don’t want a GUI at all MacVim is of more limited functionality.

You can also see the help docs (if you have MacVim you can type help MacVim as well): https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/blob/master/runtime/doc/gui_mac.txt

[eirnym]

@antoine1fr

Basically, MacVim is one of various GUIs you can find in ViM's repo. As far as I remember, it was a fork of ViM for a while, but process is too different from the base, so it was easier to run it as a separate project. Later MacVim-specific commands were introduced, which are not useful in base ViM project.

MacVim's terminal part is almost the same as the original ViM, so if a person use it in terminal, there's no difference here.