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Neovim vs Vim: What are the differences?
Developers describe Neovim as "Vim's rebirth for the 21st century". 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. On the other hand, Vim is detailed as "Highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing". 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.
Neovim and Vim can be categorized as "Text Editor" tools.
Some of the features offered by Neovim are:
- More powerful plugins
- Better GUI architecture
- First-class support for embedding
On the other hand, Vim provides the following key features:
- Vertically Split Windows
- Vimdiff
- Folding
"Modern and more powerful Vim" is the primary reason why developers consider Neovim over the competitors, whereas "Comes by default in most unix systems (remote editing)" was stated as the key factor in picking Vim.
Neovim is an open source tool with 32K GitHub stars and 2.33K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Neovim's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Vim has a broader approval, being mentioned in 850 company stacks & 890 developers stacks; compared to Neovim, which is listed in 11 company stacks and 14 developer stacks.
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?
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.
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:
- Install the 'vscode-neovim; extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetliakov.vscode-neovim)
- Install Neovim version 0.5+ nightly
- 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.
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? ;)
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
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!
Pros of Neovim
- Modern and more powerful Vim27
- Fast24
- Asynchronous plugins20
- Stable20
- Edit text fast15
- Great community13
- Vim plugins work out of the box13
- Embedable8
- Built-in terminal support8
- Unix-like7
- Plugins in any language3
- Great Colorschemes2
- External GUIs2
- Extremely customizable0
Pros of Vim
- Comes by default in most unix systems (remote editing)343
- Fast323
- Highly configurable308
- Less mouse dependence292
- Lightweight241
- Speed139
- Plugins97
- Hardcore94
- It's for pros80
- Vertically split windows64
- Open-source25
- Modal editing23
- No remembering shortcuts, instead "talks" to the editor21
- It stood the Test of Time19
- Unicode14
- Dotfiles11
- Stick with terminal11
- Everything is on the keyboard11
- VimPlugins10
- Flexible Indenting10
- Programmable9
- Large number of Shortcuts8
- Efficient and powerful8
- Hands stay on the keyboard8
- Everywhere7
- A chainsaw for text editing7
- Unmatched productivity6
- Modal editing changes everything6
- Because its not Emacs6
- You cannot exit6
- Themes5
- Developer speed5
- Super fast5
- Makes you a true bearded developer5
- Most and most powerful plugins of any editor4
- Habit4
- EasyMotion4
- Intergrated into most editors4
- Plugin manager options. Vim-plug, Pathogen, etc4
- Shortcuts3
- Intuitive, once mastered3
- Great on large text files3
- Shell escapes and shell imports :!<command> and !!cmd3
- Perfect command line editor2
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Cons of Neovim
Cons of Vim
- Ugly UI7
- Hard to learn3
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What is Neovim?
What is Vim?
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Blog Posts
cli 환경에 익숙 해지지 위해 리눅스를 자주 쓰려고 했는데, 많이들 추천 하는 에디터가 vim 이 였다. 맨 처음에는 불편했는데, 플러그인 다는 재미가 솔솔 했다. 결국 플러그인도 많이 안쓰게 되더라...vim 자체를 잘 안쓰게 되는 거 일지도, 항상 잘하고 싶지만 잘 안쓰게 되는 에디터 인것 같다.
my go to editor for all things. been a vimer for over a decade now. this is where all the magic happens. still so much to learn, the most amazing tool i use.
Vim lets me edit the Markdown content of the Hugo powered site with ease. The low bandwidth needs means I can remote in and get changes updated without issues.
Tool a while to get used to but one of the best things I have learnt recently, great training from Drew Neil over at VimCasts.
Our developers use Vim, which is great for remote pair programming. We even have a server—Bruizer—set up to host shared terminal sessions.