Vim or Neovim?

A bit of history for those who missed it.

Neovim was forked in revolt, because Bram, being a BDFL, was reluctant to “async” scripting, afair. Then in version 9 (or was it 8.x?) it still landed and neovim lost its main reason to exist. Talks about merging back were talked for a while. Now it’s functionally just a fork with different everything. I wouldn’t expect better software quality than vim, projects like vim are on another level.

Personally (opinion ahead), I find Vim a proven classic and neovim feels like yet another github project with a never-ending backlog for bells and whistles. Watching youtube videos on how it works with all these rainbow unicorn plugins makes me want to close it immediately. They made exactly that vim that Bram has foreseen and didn’t want it to evolve into, because it falls into the uncanny valley between an editor and an IDE. I believe vim mailing list should still have his message with concerns about that.

Neovim - modern and well maintained flavor, great dev team behind it, healthy plugin ecosystem, many great features you won't find in vim. Plus everything vim has to offer.

I regularly switch back and forth between the two. I maintain a cross-compatible .vimrc to make those switches simple. I don't even alias, preferring to use either `vim` or `nvim` as appropriate. As a caveat, I generally don't turn it into an IDE. I like a more vanilla experience, and using TMUX to lean on the shell for most typical IDE functions.

If I could state a preference between the two:

Vanilla VIM: Installed on every server I touch, always available, works well even without configuration.

NeoVIM: Slightly better for mixed Clojure/ClojureScript projects (with Conjure plugin) that I'm often working on.

They're the same, just ecosystems. I "grew up" on vim, and I've used nvim in recent times, and there's no substantial difference imo. Mainly it's how they get setup, not how they get used.

Emacs, on the other hand...

Just kidding, I would never use that foul operating system.

Neovim.

* "Modern" codebase. * General purpose scripting language (Lua, instead of Vimscript, which is a DSL). * Greater (and mostly maintained) extension ecosystem.

Vim is nice on ssh'd servers.

Trying neovim has been on my TODO list for a while, but I never had an actual reason for it. What's better about it that will make me want to switch? I don't care about the fact that internally it's Lua instead of Vimscript: I'm not writing code in either. All that I can see is that I'm going to adapt to the differences, which is a downside.

I just use Vim. No reason to get Neovim when it's effectively the same for my usecase, just with extra steps. Vim is already installed anywhere and feels super light.

If I wanted a fancy editor, I would just use VSCode (which I do). Vim is best for lightweight and simple uses imo, plus ssh.

NeoVim, if only because lua > vimscript.

Start with Vim if these are the only two options. Vim is more battle tested and has seen more days.

ed, man. man ed!

went from vim -> nvim -> VSCode + vim extension

I get to keep my motions and modes, get better support for normal IDE features, and a bunch of extras like being able to view images, pdfs, markdown

Neither. Stick with VScode unless you have a lot of free time and nothing better to do. Otherwise neovim if you're entering the ecosystem from scratch

Vim does it all and well!

for the functions I use with vi, don't feel the differences, LOL