There's some cool things to note about Xi which make me more excited about it:

  * It's being written by Raph Levien, known for his work on Inconsolata, Ghostscript, and font-rs[1] among other things.
  * The design goals include incredibly high performance, beauty, reliability and developer friendliness[2].
  * It's very fast at handling large files, though the editor is still missing a lot of functionality.

Raph was also interviewed on the New Rustacean podcast[3] and talks a fair bit about Xi.

  [1]: https://github.com/google/font-rs
  [2]: https://github.com/google/xi-editor#a-modern-editor-with-a-backend-written-in-rust
  [3]: http://www.newrustacean.com/show_notes/interview/_2/part_1/index.html

I don’t see how this would be better than just Neovim with a few plugins. I switched from Vim to Neovim and love it. Highly configurable and rock solid for everything I have asked it to do. Although I miss things like a live Markdown editor with preview like what you see in VS Code, but that is a small price to pay for ultimate control over your editor.

I use this plugin for previewing markdown https://github.com/suan/vim-instant-markdown

Rather, it has been started. Xi currently is a very cool technology demo, but not a viable editor.

I've just recently switched over to it for my day to day work. Admittedly there are rough edges, but I think it's fair to call it viable for sufficiently small values of viable. I expect to do a major push later in the year to polish it to the point of being really viable.