6 ms·

What's the deal with Neovim these days? Are people migrating or is Vim still the go to... Vim?

Hemospectrum 7y ago
Lots of people have migrated. Some have migrated back. Neovim is developing at a good pace, porting features from some of its GUI clients to the TUI. Some of the features that set it apart have been reimplemented and landed in upstream Vim. As such, plenty of plugins are portable across both editors. Personally, I’ve stuck with Neovim since I switched.
- chapium 7y ago
  Source please. Neovim is a bit of a pain to get started with. Vim may be obtuse but it has great documentation.
  - drbojingle 7y ago
    Pain how? I found it to be almost no different than vim. My config was nearly exactly the same.
    - mikeyjk 7y ago
      The config path is different, perhaps that was it? Or maybe an award installation a few years ago. I remember having a few minor issues with pip, due to unfamiliarity with it. Some python version shenanigans as well. These days I can't really imagine any of those being an issue.
    - wyclif 7y ago
      My config in vim and neovim is also identical. I literally downloaded neovim and just copied over my ~/.vimrc to ~/.config/nvim/init.vim and kept rolling.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
cyphar 7y ago
NeoVim is still under very active development. I switched a few years ago and have yet to feel any need to switch again -- though with Vim 8 there is less of a strong argument to switch away from Vim if you're already using it.
Avi-D-coder 7y ago
Neovim has a lot more features. Neovim's equivalent of popups are floating windows, they are just normal windows so they can be harder to configure, but the end result it better. Tree Sitter ingratiation the next big feature actively being worked on.
- Lio 7y ago
  Also interesting is that NeoVim popup windows have optional transparency (as do pop up menus).
bachmeier 7y ago
I view it as a Perl 5/Perl 6 thing. I don't want to invest in Vim, because supposedly Neovim is the future. I don't want to invest in Neovim, because it's still being developed, and with the way plugins are created using Message Pack, it seems like it has to be slow. My response: do other things with my time.
- lizmat 7y ago
  Please note that there is no longer a Perl 5 / Perl 6 thing, as Perl 6 has been renamed to Raku (https://raku.org https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). How this would apply to the Vim / Neovim situation, I'm not sure. With regards to slowness: over the past years, Raku has gained orders of magnitude in speed in almost all areas of the system.
  - bachmeier 7y ago
    > How this would apply to the Vim / Neovim situation, I'm not sure. Because year after year, the new version of Perl was supposedly on the way. After they pretty much killed the language by having a new version that wasn't ready and nobody wanting to invest in the old version, they decided to salvage what they could of their userbase. I'm seeing an exact repeat (from the view of outsiders) with Vim.
    - petre 7y ago
      Actually the Neovim development is moving at least several orders of magnitude faster than Perl6 was. And it's not "the next version" of Vim. It's an ambitious effort to improve on Vim whitout rewriting the whole thing like it happened with Perl6/Raku. "Nobody wanting to invest in the old version" is also a bit overblown.
    - thayne 7y ago
      There are a lot of differences between vim/neovim and perl 5/6: 1. When Neovim came along, vim had stagnated. Many features (notably async) in vim 8 probably would not be there if neovim didn't exist. 2. Neovim is "ready". The only feature classic vim has that is really missing from neovim is a really solid GUI (or maybe I just haven't found it yet). And at least for me, the TUI features make running it in a terminal fine. 3. Neovim has a very high level of compatibility with classic vim. Migrating from vim to neovim generally doesn't require changing the config very much if it all. Most plugins work on both. Many patches from vim are carried over to neovim, etc. It's even possible to use the same config for both neovim and classic vim, so you can easily switch between them. The biggest concern, I think, is that there is some divergence in the APIs for new features, which requires a little bit more work for plugin maintainers to support both. And without any real dependency system for plugins, it's more complicated to distribute a compatibility layer. (and polyfills are impossible since you can't have all-lowercase user-defined function names in vim) At this point you can mostly think of neovim and classic vim as two implementations of the same thing. Both are innovating, and ideas are shared between them, but sometimes they have slightly different APIs for new or experimental features, but hopefully those apis converge over time.
loeg 7y ago
I switched to Neovim last week (from vim) and it was pretty painless. mkdir -p $HOME/.config/nvim cat >> $HOME/.config/nvim/init.vim << __EOF__ set runtimepath^=~/.vim runtimepath+=~/.vim/after let &packpath = &runtimepath source ~/.vimrc __EOF__ And it just uses my vim configuration and plugins. The "default" colorscheme rendered slightly differently than vim for me, so I messed around to find a new colorscheme that did what I wanted. I had to fix my .screenrc in a handful of ways for neovim: * I had it set to pretend to be xterm ('term xterm'), but that confuses neovim quite a bit.[1] Additionally, terminology (the term emulator I use) sets XTERM_256_COLORS, which confuses neovim into thinking TERM is xterm. So I added 'unsetenv XTERM_256_COLORS' in screenrc as well. * Also, I had to add 'maptimeout 1' to allow Esc to leave insert mode as quickly as it did in vim, when running nvim under screen.[2] That's about all I've done to switch. The existing plugins I had all worked out of the box. [1]: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/FAQ#home-or-some-other-special-key-doesnt-work https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/FAQ#home-or-some-other... [2]: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/FAQ#esc-in-tmux-or-gnu-screen-is-delayed https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/FAQ#esc-in-tmux-or-gnu...
caymanjim 7y ago
I switched to neovim about six years ago because completion backed by language servers was unusably-slow without neovim's asynchronous support. That was added to Vim in 8.0, and since then, there's been no difference between the two for my workflow. I use the same config for both Vim and neovim (save for a couple minor unimportant tweaks). I don't think there's a compelling reason for many people to switch to neovim right now. I appreciate that the appearance of neovim was a real kick in the ass and prompted improvements in Vim. Vim had been essentially stagnant with no new features for a decade. It's now got frequent releases and tracks neovim's improvements closely. neovim's existence continues to improve Vim itself through innovation and competitive pressure. I value neovim for how it's revitalized the Vim community, and I still use it mostly because while there's no reason for me to switch to neovim these days, there's also no reason to switch back.
- unrealhoang 7y ago
  I believe the lua engine will be the true divergence as I don’t think vim can follow easily. Lua will create more and more non-compatible plugins.
- ashkankiani 7y ago
  As part of the neovim team and the author of the built in LSP for Neovim, I'd say that 0.5 is where things will really diverge. One of those factors is the built-in LSP support, but the others are the ramping up of Lua plugins being written, the extranges/extmarks features being worked on, the treesitter integration, and some other features I won't mention for fear of drumming up premature hype. I completely agree with you otherwise. Neovim inspired Vim/Bram to kick things back into gear, and Neovim also took some inspiration from Vim's ideas, and the two have been close for a while, but the Lua integration is beginning to pay dividends which will cause a wider rift. Vimscript is not an ergonomic programming language or very performant compared to Lua, and I'm pretty sure that everyone can agree with that. E: Oh, and I plan to make an answer to KillerSheep for the 0.5 release that will hopefully be equally or more impressive. :P
  - caymanjim 7y ago
fatbird 7y ago
I switched when neovim was only a year old, just to see if my vim environment spun up without issue, and it did. Then the async linting won me over, and I've never looked at vim again. I'm less excited about the stream of new features than I am about a dev community that's less BDFL focussed. I'm looking forward to using lua for plugins as an entry point to get more involved in neovim development. Getting into the vim developer community just seems a lot... more difficult.
VvR-Ox 7y ago
I prefer neovim because it has a more active developer community (487 contributors vs. 2). I have more trust in the strength of a community to go on developing it. In case something happens to the vim contributor(s) - e.g. one is struck by a lightning and the other one gets sick for a long time then it will be difficult to maintain it. As long as everything works fine I didn't have any reason to try vim again. Though I am happy to see they move forward as well.

Lots of people have migrated. Some have migrated back. Neovim is developing at a good pace, porting features from some of its GUI clients to the TUI. Some of the features that set it apart have been reimplemented and landed in upstream Vim. As such, plenty of plugins are portable across both editors. Personally, I’ve stuck with Neovim since I switched.

chapium 7y ago
Source please. Neovim is a bit of a pain to get started with. Vim may be obtuse but it has great documentation.
- drbojingle 7y ago
  Pain how? I found it to be almost no different than vim. My config was nearly exactly the same.
  - mikeyjk 7y ago
    The config path is different, perhaps that was it? Or maybe an award installation a few years ago. I remember having a few minor issues with pip, due to unfamiliarity with it. Some python version shenanigans as well. These days I can't really imagine any of those being an issue.
  - wyclif 7y ago
    My config in vim and neovim is also identical. I literally downloaded neovim and just copied over my ~/.vimrc to ~/.config/nvim/init.vim and kept rolling.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

cyphar 7y ago

NeoVim is still under very active development. I switched a few years ago and have yet to feel any need to switch again -- though with Vim 8 there is less of a strong argument to switch away from Vim if you're already using it.

Avi-D-coder 7y ago

Neovim has a lot more features. Neovim's equivalent of popups are floating windows, they are just normal windows so they can be harder to configure, but the end result it better. Tree Sitter ingratiation the next big feature actively being worked on.

Lio 7y ago
Also interesting is that NeoVim popup windows have optional transparency (as do pop up menus).

bachmeier 7y ago

I view it as a Perl 5/Perl 6 thing. I don't want to invest in Vim, because supposedly Neovim is the future. I don't want to invest in Neovim, because it's still being developed, and with the way plugins are created using Message Pack, it seems like it has to be slow. My response: do other things with my time.

lizmat 7y ago
Please note that there is no longer a Perl 5 / Perl 6 thing, as Perl 6 has been renamed to Raku (https://raku.org https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). How this would apply to the Vim / Neovim situation, I'm not sure. With regards to slowness: over the past years, Raku has gained orders of magnitude in speed in almost all areas of the system.
- bachmeier 7y ago
  > How this would apply to the Vim / Neovim situation, I'm not sure. Because year after year, the new version of Perl was supposedly on the way. After they pretty much killed the language by having a new version that wasn't ready and nobody wanting to invest in the old version, they decided to salvage what they could of their userbase. I'm seeing an exact repeat (from the view of outsiders) with Vim.
  - petre 7y ago
    Actually the Neovim development is moving at least several orders of magnitude faster than Perl6 was. And it's not "the next version" of Vim. It's an ambitious effort to improve on Vim whitout rewriting the whole thing like it happened with Perl6/Raku. "Nobody wanting to invest in the old version" is also a bit overblown.
  - thayne 7y ago
    There are a lot of differences between vim/neovim and perl 5/6: 1. When Neovim came along, vim had stagnated. Many features (notably async) in vim 8 probably would not be there if neovim didn't exist. 2. Neovim is "ready". The only feature classic vim has that is really missing from neovim is a really solid GUI (or maybe I just haven't found it yet). And at least for me, the TUI features make running it in a terminal fine. 3. Neovim has a very high level of compatibility with classic vim. Migrating from vim to neovim generally doesn't require changing the config very much if it all. Most plugins work on both. Many patches from vim are carried over to neovim, etc. It's even possible to use the same config for both neovim and classic vim, so you can easily switch between them. The biggest concern, I think, is that there is some divergence in the APIs for new features, which requires a little bit more work for plugin maintainers to support both. And without any real dependency system for plugins, it's more complicated to distribute a compatibility layer. (and polyfills are impossible since you can't have all-lowercase user-defined function names in vim) At this point you can mostly think of neovim and classic vim as two implementations of the same thing. Both are innovating, and ideas are shared between them, but sometimes they have slightly different APIs for new or experimental features, but hopefully those apis converge over time.

loeg 7y ago

I switched to Neovim last week (from vim) and it was pretty painless. mkdir -p $HOME/.config/nvim cat >> $HOME/.config/nvim/init.vim << __EOF__ set runtimepath^=~/.vim runtimepath+=~/.vim/after let &packpath = &runtimepath source ~/.vimrc __EOF__ And it just uses my vim configuration and plugins. The "default" colorscheme rendered slightly differently than vim for me, so I messed around to find a new colorscheme that did what I wanted. I had to fix my .screenrc in a handful of ways for neovim: * I had it set to pretend to be xterm ('term xterm'), but that confuses neovim quite a bit.[1] Additionally, terminology (the term emulator I use) sets XTERM_256_COLORS, which confuses neovim into thinking TERM is xterm. So I added 'unsetenv XTERM_256_COLORS' in screenrc as well. * Also, I had to add 'maptimeout 1' to allow Esc to leave insert mode as quickly as it did in vim, when running nvim under screen.[2] That's about all I've done to switch. The existing plugins I had all worked out of the box. [1]: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/FAQ#home-or-some-other-special-key-doesnt-work https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/FAQ#home-or-some-other... [2]: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/FAQ#esc-in-tmux-or-gnu-screen-is-delayed https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/FAQ#esc-in-tmux-or-gnu...

caymanjim 7y ago

I switched to neovim about six years ago because completion backed by language servers was unusably-slow without neovim's asynchronous support. That was added to Vim in 8.0, and since then, there's been no difference between the two for my workflow. I use the same config for both Vim and neovim (save for a couple minor unimportant tweaks). I don't think there's a compelling reason for many people to switch to neovim right now. I appreciate that the appearance of neovim was a real kick in the ass and prompted improvements in Vim. Vim had been essentially stagnant with no new features for a decade. It's now got frequent releases and tracks neovim's improvements closely. neovim's existence continues to improve Vim itself through innovation and competitive pressure. I value neovim for how it's revitalized the Vim community, and I still use it mostly because while there's no reason for me to switch to neovim these days, there's also no reason to switch back.

unrealhoang 7y ago
I believe the lua engine will be the true divergence as I don’t think vim can follow easily. Lua will create more and more non-compatible plugins.
ashkankiani 7y ago
As part of the neovim team and the author of the built in LSP for Neovim, I'd say that 0.5 is where things will really diverge. One of those factors is the built-in LSP support, but the others are the ramping up of Lua plugins being written, the extranges/extmarks features being worked on, the treesitter integration, and some other features I won't mention for fear of drumming up premature hype. I completely agree with you otherwise. Neovim inspired Vim/Bram to kick things back into gear, and Neovim also took some inspiration from Vim's ideas, and the two have been close for a while, but the Lua integration is beginning to pay dividends which will cause a wider rift. Vimscript is not an ergonomic programming language or very performant compared to Lua, and I'm pretty sure that everyone can agree with that. E: Oh, and I plan to make an answer to KillerSheep for the 0.5 release that will hopefully be equally or more impressive. :P
- caymanjim 7y ago

fatbird 7y ago

I switched when neovim was only a year old, just to see if my vim environment spun up without issue, and it did. Then the async linting won me over, and I've never looked at vim again. I'm less excited about the stream of new features than I am about a dev community that's less BDFL focussed. I'm looking forward to using lua for plugins as an entry point to get more involved in neovim development. Getting into the vim developer community just seems a lot... more difficult.

VvR-Ox 7y ago

I prefer neovim because it has a more active developer community (487 contributors vs. 2). I have more trust in the strength of a community to go on developing it. In case something happens to the vim contributor(s) - e.g. one is struck by a lightning and the other one gets sick for a long time then it will be difficult to maintain it. As long as everything works fine I didn't have any reason to try vim again. Though I am happy to see they move forward as well.