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Comment by eibrahim | Hacker News Reader

Why should I use this over vim?

I am a web developer so I am mostly editing html, JavaScript, ruby and css files.

I love my tmux + vim setup. Give me reasons to switch. I mean practical reasons to switch not technical implementation niceties.

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Some of the more successful features that appeared first in NeoVim have also been adopted in Vim 8. One of the new features in this release is that NeoVim will use the tmux clipboard if running in Tmux, so you can use "+y to yank in one Vim instance and "+p to paste into another vim instance running elsewhere in tmux. https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/6894/files

I remember hearing that vim8 added some of the concurrency for plugins that neovim introduced. At the time, it sounded like this was done in a non-compatible way. I haven't really followed up with this, so I'm wondering if that's still the case (or ever was). Do concurrent neovim plugins work in vim8 without change?

welp, i'm convinced!

one cool thing is the `:terminal` mode which allows you to move a lot of window management to nvim, and your terminal is now an nvim buffer (with all the exciting possibilities that affords :) Vim window management comes naturally if you spend sufficient time in vim.

I'm using tmux less now (although my knowledge of it was limited at best), but its still useful for persistence and some window management.

:terminal is now also part of the Vim 8 patches as an experimental feature. NeoVim seems to have a large influence on Vim, given that the previous "vimshell" patches never made it into upstream.

Is it any different to :terminal in Vim?

Do you really want to do window management and terminal tasks in your text editor? I'd rather use my window manager for managing windows, or my terminal for doing terminal tasks.

Just try to imagine someone wanting to have the editor fill the entire screen, and designate one small pane to a terminal. I can't imagine how to do that with something like tmux and vim (other than running multiple instances of vim which is bad for its own reasons).

Take a cross split.

https://i.imgur.com/Flqexnq.png

I left neovim for vim, though, because of the known system clipboard pasting issue.

> I left neovim for vim, though, because of the known system clipboard pasting issue.

What clipboard issue is that? I couldn't find it online, and don't currently use neovim.

I do those things inside emacs.

I don’t use it regularly, but it’s handy in a few scenarios. When you’re in a terminal and working with nvim and never launched tmux, it’s handy to be able to build or access a REPL without suspending your editor. Also, in a GUI editor where you don’t have tmux.

Do you refuse to use vim's tabs and windows for the same reason?

It makes it really easy to write Perl/c, compile and run it, search the history for output of previous runs etc. It's a big improvement on having to have multiple putty sessions, or even alt-tabbing between shells on a box with a UI.

I don't refuse to use tabs or windows, but a lot of the times I'd rather split them out into separate non-vim windows.

I guess it all depends on your workflow though. I mainly use vim in a tiling wm environment on Linux, not through putty on Windows.

You shouldn't feel compelled to switch, Nvim is intentionally user-compatible with Vim.

But these days it also makes sense to ask instead "why should I use Vim?" The version of Vim that you actually use probably wasn't installed by default on your main development system. So installing Nvim is the same as upgrading Vim.

What do you use as your main development system? I'm on an Arch Linux VM, so I have an up-to-date Vim 8.0.

And since Vim 8.0 does terminals and asynchronous jobs now, I don't see much value for Neovim unless you have an IDE that integrates Neovim via its API.

> unless you have an IDE that integrates Neovim via its API.

This will be the biggest win for Neovim. When something like pycharm/webstorm vim support is moved to real vim rather than a reimplementation I will change.

I used to think in similar paths too. Honestly, NeoVim's biggest wins are a nice website, cleaner code (I think) and XDG basedir support.

(And to be fair, switching on Arch is really easy since it's in the official repositories)

I tried NVim maybe 2 years ago. At this time it wasn't able to read my complete .vimrc. So that was a huge show stopper. Does that work now and can I be sure that nvim creates the same setup based on my rc file?

Not sure about your setup, but my .vimrc is pretty non-trivial and nvim Just Works. I even have ~/.config/nvim just symlinked to ~/.vimrc.

He literally asked several times for reasons to switch to nvim, but your answer basically amounts to "well because it's not hard". Telling him upgrading is not hard, or that it is compatible with vim gives him nothing.

From the nvim GitHub page:

    Modern GUIs
    API access from any language including clojure, lisp, go, haskell, lua, javascript, perl, python, ruby, rust.
    Embedded, scriptable terminal emulator
    Asynchronous job control
    Shared data (shada) among multiple editor instances
    XDG base directories support
    Compatible with most Vim plugins, including Ruby and Python plugins.

Yes. My perspective is:

- It's ok if this person doesn't want to use Nvim.

- The "Why should I switch to Nvim" question is based on a questionable premise. I think the question should be "Why should I should to Vim".

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