What's the elevator pitch for Neovim over regular Vim or GVim? I see verbiage about extensibility and modern guis, but has any Vim user actually seen real world benefit after switching to NeoVim? Is it all just icing?
This[0] post about the early days of NeoVim development made some interesting points about Vim, but one choice quote I recalled and had to google,
> Some of Vim’s source code isn’t even valid text. It’s not ASCII or UTF-8. The venerable file can’t figure out the encoding...
Re-building things to a more solid foundation enables new workflows that are currently challenging. As a Vim user, I have longingly looked at the Emacs ecosystem, with its saner extension language (though Emacs lisp has its own historical baggage weighing them down). Once Lua becomes the default, I expect to see new evolution in features that would otherwise not have made it to the Vim scene. At worst, I can imagine VSCode javascript plugins get transpiled to Lua to run within NeoVim.
[0] https://geoff.greer.fm/2015/01/15/why-neovim-is-better-than-...
For shell interaction, I use eshell, a UNIX shell written in Elisp, as often as I use anything else. It has some sharp edges, but it takes more sharp edges off shell interaction so it generally makes, for me, the most pleasant way to interact with the shell.
I am aware of no NeoVim project aiming at something like eshell, and it would not, I think, be a good fit for the NeoVim philosophy if it were tried.
Is Neovim flexible enough that it could stop being vim? Remove the modal key-system and implement something of your own? Has enough introspektion to allow something like emacs which-keys? This is a module which show a list of valid keys that can be pressed when you are inside a keychain.
Some things I like about neovim over vim.
- Lua integration as first class citizen.
- Treesitter
- lsp built in
- Feeling that the community is super active and in a period of movement.
I love being able to hack and add specific functionality to my own workflow in lua just as part of the editor. I can add features in a way that I just can't in VS Code or vim. It's no emacs level of hackability, but it's a happy medium for me.
I have no knowledge about VSCode's JS nor NVim's Lua APIs beyond that one can write extensions in these langs. Would you be able to expand on what can you do with Lua in Nvim that can't be done in VSCode? That could really be a tipping point for me.
Meanwhile the "hello world" tutorial for extending VS Code starts out with installing Node.js & multiple npm packages and compiling some source file.
For a power user it's just not the same, and there's no way I'd ever switch to another editor without this flexibility.
As a result, the plugin ecosystem is exploding. You can find a directory of neovim specific plugins here: https://neovimcraft.com
These are by no means must haves, and there are workable alternatives, but IMO they're nice improvements that warrant the small switching overhead.
I've tried NeoVim for a couple of month this year.
It's a tad snappier than vim, but there are a number of "quirks" (behaves ok, but doesn't behave exactly like vim) that made me walk away from it: at this point, vim is so hard-wired in my brain that any tiny difference in behavior is painful.
1. searching for stuff with / jumps prematurely to destination, drives me nuts.
2. I have most "smart" features (auto-indent type stuff) disabled for C++ mode in my .vimrc, which works fine in vim but is completely ignored by neovim. It requires futzing around with post/pre loading of plugins, which - 1.who has the time to do these things 2. makes for incompatible init files.
3. does not read .vimrc by default and requires linking files to have a united init file
I might revisit neovim the day I have enough time on my hand to figure out how to install the whole tresitter shebang.
I always set Vim to jump to the first search result in realtime because that lets me take a glance at another part of the file and then immediately jump back with Esc. So that way I didn't notice this apparently became a default setting in NeoVim. Which is still a weird thing and shouldn't happen imho.
And I always have all kinds of smart features disabled in every situation because almost nothing annoys me more in software, and as far as I can tell nothing changed with the switch.
The init.vim thing is definitely cumbersome when you just want to try it out, even though in the end it's just a symbolic link.
> I might revisit neovim the day I have enough time on my hand to figure out how to install the whole tresitter shebang.
I just did that last week, it's relatively straightforward with the guide in the vim-treesitter readme but requires the nightly build until NeoVim 0.5 releases. And if I'm not mistaken that future version will make it easier too.
can I apt-get it ?
I still use Neovim, but this is my main gripe. Broadly I like it a lot, for reasons others have covered.