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Comment by 101km | Hacker News Reader

I've been running a bare vim since I've switched laptops and enjoyed the simplicity.

It is time to reintroduce some of the fanciness I used to have configured. I was looking forward to trying out Neovim but meanwhile Vim 8 has come out. Which way should I go now?

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Since it looks like we're heading into a period of good competition between vim and neovim, I'd give neovim a serious try if you haven't already. It has a well-developed async architecture that most major plugins take advantage of, if sensible, and it has embedded terminal functionality. For the moment, vim 8 doesn't have async plugins to match, so after trying neovim for a while, you can switch back to vim 8 once its plugins catch up and get a better comparison.

I have been using NeoVim for half a year and have not looked back. It is backward compatible (completes Vim test suite successfully) and brings some other goodies, such as async jobs (I know Vim 8.0 has these but they have been in NeoVim since I switched) and a great terminal emulator. It has much better defaults that I did not know about when I was using Vim. Honestly - give both a try - installing NeoVim, all you have to import your settings is to symlink your .vimrc to .nvimrc, as far as I remember

Thanks, I didn't about the terminal emulator! Now that I launched it via vsplit and :set modifiable - how can I switch back to the second buffer?

<C-\><C-n> leaves you in normal mode again, and then you can navigate as usual.

Note that you can bind something like `jj` to this command in the terminal in order to more easily get out of terminal insert mode. Use `tnoremap`

Use <C-\><C-n> to get back into normal mode so you can use <C-w>w and and friends. Or you can use your mouse since Neovim by default does 'set mouse=a' iirc.

you can use terminal-bufffer settings too:

:tnoremap <Esc> <C-\><C-n>

:tnoremap <A-h> <C-\><C-n><C-w>h

:tnoremap <A-j> <C-\><C-n><C-w>j

:tnoremap <A-k> <C-\><C-n><C-w>k

:tnoremap <A-l> <C-\><C-n><C-w>l

If you've been running bare vim, then using either will be fine. Unless you're planning on turning your bare vim into a rather heavy IDE, you're not going to really experience much difference between vim 8 and neovim.

Edit to add: or if you really need a terminal emulator

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