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Neovim vs gedit: What are the differences?

Introduction

Neovim and gedit are two popular text editors used by developers for coding and text editing tasks. While both serve the same purpose, they have key differences that set them apart in terms of features, functionality, and user experience.

  1. Cross-platform compatibility: Neovim is known for its strong cross-platform support, working seamlessly on Windows, macOS, and various Linux distributions. On the other hand, gedit is primarily designed for GNOME-based Linux systems, limiting its availability on other platforms such as Windows or macOS.

  2. Extensibility and Plugins: Neovim excels in extensibility by providing a rich ecosystem of plugins and customization options through its Lua API. This allows users to enhance and tailor their editing environment according to their preferences. Gedit, while extensible to a certain extent, lacks the extensive plugin support and customization capabilities offered by Neovim.

  3. Modal Editing: One of the defining features of Neovim is its modal editing system, following the tradition of Vim. This approach separates editing modes for improved efficiency and speed in text manipulation. In contrast, gedit relies on a more traditional linear editing model, where users work primarily in an insert mode without distinct modal separation.

  4. Community and Development: Neovim boasts a vibrant and active community of users and contributors who continuously drive the development and improvement of the editor. This results in frequent updates, bug fixes, and new features being introduced regularly. While gedit also has a community of supporters, the pace of development and innovation may not be as rapid or pronounced as in the case of Neovim.

  5. Remote Collaboration and Terminal Integration: Neovim supports remote collaboration through plugins like Nvim-R or built-in features like Neovim-Remote. This allows multiple users to edit a file simultaneously, making it an attractive option for pair programming. Furthermore, Neovim seamlessly integrates with terminal applications, providing a more cohesive workflow for users who heavily rely on command-line interfaces. Gedit, on the other hand, may have limitations in this aspect, especially concerning advanced terminal integration and remote collaboration features.

  6. Customizability: Neovim offers extensive customization options, allowing users to tweak every aspect of their editing experience, from key bindings to themes and plugins. This high degree of customizability appeals to power users or those seeking a tailored editing environment. While gedit does provide some level of customization through preferences and extensions, the scope and flexibility may not match that of Neovim.

In Summary, Neovim stands out for its cross-platform compatibility, extensive extensibility, modal editing system, active community and development, support for remote collaboration and terminal integration, and unparalleled customizability compared to gedit.

Advice on gedit and Neovim
Rogério R. Alcântara
Needs advice
on
NeovimNeovim
and
VimVim

For a Visual Studio Code/Atom developer that works mostly with Node.js/TypeScript/Ruby/Go and wants to get rid of graphic-text-editors-IDE-like at once, which one is worthy of investing time to pick up?

I'm a total n00b on the subject, but I've read good things about Neovim's Lua support, and I wonder what would be the VIM response/approach for it?

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Replies (6)
Recommends
on
NeovimNeovimVimVim

Neovim can basically do everything Vim can with one major advantage - the number of contributors to the code base is just so much wider (Vim is ~100% maintained only by B. Mooleanaar). Whatever you learn for Neovim you can also apply to Vim and vice versa. And of course there is the never ending Vim vs Emacs controversy - but better not get into that war.

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Jeffrey Johnson
Recommends
at

Actually, the biggest advantage with Neovim (as a VS user) is that you can embed REAL Neovim as the editor UI, rather than using a "Vim emulation", you're using actual NVIM, embedded in VS!

"asvetliakov.vscode-neovim" is the extension you are looking for:

  1. Install the 'vscode-neovim; extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetliakov.vscode-neovim)
  2. Install Neovim version 0.5+ nightly
  3. Start winning.

(You can install neovim-nightly separately for just vscode, I usually build and install it to /opt/nvim - it's enough enough to do - let me know if you need help).

Works wonderfully. It might not work out of the box if you have some 100K epic nvim initialization file, but the plugin documents a workaround for having an embedding/VS specific configuration.

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Kudos Beluga
Recommends
on
NeovimNeovim

I don't actually notice much of a difference between the two, as the end result looks identical. If you use Vim and are switch to Neovim it's an extremely easy 1-minute process. I switched from Vim to Neovim. I can't say I found much of a difference, but the key points where Neovim could be better than just vim is that first, there are much more people maintaining Neovim compared to vim, which means fewer bugs and a modern code base. It also has a smaller code base which might result in a small speed improvement. Another thing is that it's basically just a fork of vim, so what harm can it do? ;)

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Recommends
on
VimVim

I recommend using vim 8+ it has native plugin support if you need language supports you can install the package vim-nox which will come with support for python, lua, ruby, etc

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Rogério R. Alcântara
Recommends
on
NeovimNeovim

The hints on the codebase's contributors and the VSCode integration helped me make up my mind.

I really appreciate all comments, though.

Thanks a bunch!

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Albert Kim
Recommends

It truly depends on whether you want to completely avoid GUI and stick to TUI and command lines. If you want to edit all of your codes within a terminal, then Vim or neovim would be the choice. Emacs can be run in a terminal, but the functionality is limited. Most people use Emacs using GUI and emacs-client not to use too much memory.

My general preference is to use an independent text editor, which is better if it is highly customizable and programmable. So, I have used Emacs for several years. For beginners, I guess Emacs requires significant time to learn to fully enjoy its wonderful functionalities. In that sense, using atom would be a recommendable option.

Regardless of all the situations, learning basic vim in the terminal will help you in any case. In summary, I recommend 1. vim as a default editor in the terminal 2. atom if you are a beginner, or 3. Emacs if you have a long-term plan to master a programmable editor

Other editors like sublime text, VS code, and so forth are also worth learning and using. But, no matter which editor you choose, stick to one or two until you become an advanced user. Being able to use most text editors at an intermediate level is waste of time.

I hope it helps.

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Pros of gedit
Pros of Neovim
  • 10
    Fast
  • 9
    Lightweight
  • 9
    GNOME Integration
  • 5
    Syntax Highlighting
  • 3
    Immediately starts
  • 3
    Tabbed UI
  • 2
    Free
  • 2
    I love gnu-linux
  • 1
    External tools and snippets
  • 1
    Supports every programming language
  • 1
    Spell Check
  • 1
    If you took cs50, you know gedit
  • 1
    Old gedit based on gtk2
  • 31
    Modern and more powerful Vim
  • 27
    Fast
  • 22
    Asynchronous plugins
  • 20
    Stable
  • 18
    Edit text fast
  • 15
    Great community
  • 15
    Vim plugins work out of the box
  • 9
    Embedable
  • 8
    Unix-like
  • 8
    Built-in terminal support
  • 4
    Plugins in any language
  • 2
    External GUIs
  • 2
    Great Colorschemes
  • 2
    Extremely customizable

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Cons of gedit
Cons of Neovim
  • 2
    GTK3
    Be the first to leave a con

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    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is gedit?

    gedit is the GNOME text editor. While aiming at simplicity and ease of use, gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.

    What is Neovim?

    Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

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    What tools integrate with gedit?
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    What are some alternatives to gedit and Neovim?
    Vim
    Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.
    Atom
    At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.
    Emacs
    GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.
    Geany
    Geany is a small and lightweight Integrated Development Environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. Another goal was to be as independent as possible from a special Desktop Environment like KDE or GNOME - Geany only requires the GTK2 runtime libraries.
    Visual Studio Code
    Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.
    See all alternatives