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Comment by Jenk | Hacker News Reader

Neovim is vim 8 compatible. It _also_ supports LUA script for config and plugins, has native LSP support, and runs much more efficiently.

You can run your current .vimrc using neovim.

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  >Neovim ... supports LUA script for config and plugins

Except it doesn't really. Or at least it's very basic. I'll re-post a comment I made on this, when it was discussed a while back [0]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32624308

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I've been using Neovim for several years now. Not for any real reason, other than "Let's try 'new & shiny'" when it first emerged. Last week I thought I'd finally get round to converting my existing Neovim init.vim config [which had itself been inherited and developed from my earlier Vim .vimrc one] to Lua [not a language I'd ever used before. But the syntax looked fairly straightforward].

What a waste of time! The easy stuff [enabling/disabling various options] was easy. But then it's easy in Vimscript too. The difficult stuff [defining autocmds, managing my plugins] was either completely ignored in every single "convert your init.vim to to init.lua" tutorial I read... or required wrapping the existing Vimscript block in

  vim.cmd[[ ... ]]

in Lua because Neovim's Lua support can't yet do a lot of this stuff natively. Oh, and this also had the brilliant side-effect of removing syntax highlighting from great swathes of my config file as everything inside vim.cmd[[ ... ]] is rendered as a comment. I spent the best part of a day wrestling with converting to init.lua, left it overnight and then, in the morning thought Why the fuck am I wasting time trying to beat this into shape, when my existing vim.init is already set up exactly how I want it?" and I reverted back to good ol' crusty ol' unfashionable Vimscript.

YMMV if you're actively developing plugins and want to use a more widely utilised language to write them in. But for configuring Neovim itself, Lua is more hassle than it's worth.

The Neovim API is more fully baked now than it was.

I went through the same thing back in the day… now it’s a breeze and I’ve never coded in Lua before. Part of the problem was different users suggesting different things.

"Build your first Neovim configuration in lua” is a good introduction [1].

[1]: https://vonheikemen.github.io/devlog/tools/build-your-first-...

Couple things. Over the last year, the lua API has expanded. You can now do almost everything with only lua! Autocmds, commands, plugin management - all in lua. Even key-mappings can call lua closures directly! And with treesitter, the strings in `vim.cmd([[...]])` calls get highlighted as vimscript.

Not saying you should give it another go, just that your info is out of date ;)

I found this very helpful when switching to nvim recently. Kudos to the author for having the nvim config on github and making videos explaining how he set it all up:

https://github.com/LunarVim/Neovim-from-scratch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctH-a-1eUME&list=PLhoH5vyxr6...

I gotta say, the Neovim guys are killin’ it on YouTube and Twitch.

They’re reaching a new generation of Neovim/Vim users.

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