Ask HN: Vim vs. Neovim
I'm using vim for a long time now, but recently I heard that neovim is noticeably faster.
Is that true? Have most folks switched to neovim by now? Should I care?
Is that true? Have most folks switched to neovim by now? Should I care?
Neovim is faster; of course, YMMV. Even if you use Neovim just like Vim, it's snappier—the refactor resulted in 30% less code.
> Have most folks switched to neovim by now? Should I care?
There's two broad groups. Users who have been using Vim for like 20 years and they have a configuration they like and see no reason to change.
The other group wants all of the new hotness of Language Server Protocol, tree sitter, everything's asynchronous, there's a proper API and lots of new plugins that wouldn't be possible using Vimscript, for the most part.
Check out https://neovim.io/doc/user/vim_diff.html#nvim-features for details.
Being a Vim (now Neovim) user for close to 20 years, Neovim has attracted lots of new people to Vim-style editors and they've brought lots of energy. There's also been quite an influx of VS Code users.
Neovim is not an IDE, but it can support many IDE-like features via plugins written in Lua. There are several Neovim distributions, which you can install quickly and play around without committing to anything [1]. LunaVim, LazyVim and AstroVim are popular Neovim distributions.
It's important to understand that your existing .vimrc will Just Work if you want to start with that.
[1]: https://github.com/rockerBOO/awesome-neovim#preconfigured-co...
In my opinion, the huge delta between TextMate and Vim easily justified a switch, back then, but the differences between Vim and Neovim are way too marginal. If you are big on plugins, maybe, but I am not, so YMMV.