GilHub stars matter as much as SourceForgeâs badges or whatever similar other platforms have. The two distributions I am involved both earned the âOpen Source Excellencyâ badge in SourceForge (which is not an easy task.) Does it really matter to anyone other than the developers? And even them donât always pay much attention on such achievements. In one of those distributions, I had to insist so that they finally agreed to put the badge in their website.
A very C good library I use (and have custom bindings for Fortran) is on SourceForge and the developers flat-out refused to move on GitHub when some users asked for it in the name of âmore audienceâ. The file manager, the editor, and many other applications I am using do not have a presence in any of the platforms I mentioned. Who will count people doing something similar, and how?
I donât think Bram Moolenaar would care much about stars either. And he didnât need to, anyway.
Furthermore, does it really matter to potential users? Stars definitely matters to some, some others wonât care at all. Do you really watch a movie because it earned glamorous awards? The best movies I still remember barely earned any of the most known awards. Itâs more or less the same thing here. In fact, whenever I see overwhelmingly positive reaction to a new project, I am very, very suspicious due to previous experience with those. I can name many projects that were welcomed with open arms and when I tried them I thought âSeriously? this thing is so popular?â
Whether Vim or Neovim is used more today, is something you just canât measure. âModernâ applications do this with telemetry (they do way more nasty things with telemetry but thatâs another story.) There isnât such a thing in Vim/Neovim - and thatâs great, I might add. Many people will just use whatever their distribution does install by default, as long it has the features they are used to. In one of the distributions I am involved, thatâs Vim, in the other one itâs Neovim, unless you pick the âbare bonesâ basic installation. FreeBSD doesnât really promote any. I donât really know what happens in⌠that other âoperating systemâ which is very popular.
As an Emacs user, I saw many forks of it over the years - although Emacs is not an editor per se, so what is a âforkâ and whatâs just a package, a major add-on, is not exactly clear in some cases. What I do is to check if that new âforkâ brings anything new I really need and, most importantly, it it breaks any kind of compatibility in the features I typically use. Someone else will do different. Who will really count how many did this or that, and how?