It will have a clone. Something like NEI has been around too long and had too many users to die. The same way TMI's interface was kept for NEI purely because people recognised how to use it.
I prefer using TooManyItems for 1.7 instead of NEI and the most recent TMI for 1.8 is also bad (for me, I don't like this). But only NEI can show recipes instead of cheating when clicking in the items...
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