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Comment by jgb1984 | Hacker News Reader

jgb1984

Most of the negatives mentioned (fragility, bugs, plugins breaking often) are specific to neovim. It's one of the reasons why I am and will always keep using vim instead of neovim. Vim is a much more mature ecosystem, less chasing the newest "plugin du jour", my vimrc is stable, based on a few dozen plugins which are feature complete and rock solid stable.

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Not sure what this fragility is. I’ve been using Neovim from the very first days, and it’s been stable throghout.

Granted I have a 10+ year old vimrc and rarely add new plugins, but saying Neovim is fragile is nonsense. Don’t install every new plugin perhaps?

Same. Neovim and plugins I use have been remarkably stable from the start

I used Vim for around 15 years before switching to Neovim. I have no desire to go back.

In my experience Neovim is very reliable, even when building off `master`, which I did for a couple of years.

Yeah, I was on the nightly release (via nix) for a while. Rock solid.

I was about to make a very similar comment. I won't say I'll never switch to neovim, for a lot depends on future vim/neovim development, and unexpected things happen.

But I do agree that vim's stability is priceless. It's been years without any need for major changes in my vimrc, and without any trouble with the plugins I use.

I'm sympathetic with the author, though. Whenever you need to change, finding an alternative that "just works" always makes things easier and you can quickly get back to being productive. I'm not so sure that I wouldn't go down a similar path if the vim ecosystem collapsed.

You don't have to chase plugins with either Vim or Neovim you know? You can even use the same Vim plugins in Neovim if you wanted to.

It's true that Neovim leans more towards more changes and thus more risk of bugs, but claiming that Neovim is unstable is unfounded.

Do you mind sharing that list of plugins you use? I have never used plugins with vim/neovim and only used them vanilla up to this point but interested in checking out the plugin ecosystem.

This is a copy paste from the relevant part of my vimrc. Keep in mind I mainly develop in python.

Plug 'alvan/vim-closetag' Plug 'ap/vim-buftabline' Plug 'davidhalter/jedi-vim' Plug 'dense-analysis/ale' Plug 'dstein64/vim-startuptime' Plug 'itchyny/lightline.vim' Plug 'junegunn/fzf', { 'dir': '~/.fzf', 'do': { -> fzf#install() } } Plug 'junegunn/fzf.vim' Plug 'junegunn/vim-peekaboo' Plug 'machakann/vim-swap' Plug 'markonm/traces.vim' Plug 'mhinz/vim-signify' Plug 'preservim/nerdtree' Plug 'preservim/tagbar' Plug 'romainl/vim-cool' Plug 'simnalamburt/vim-mundo' Plug 'tpope/vim-characterize' Plug 'tpope/vim-commentary' Plug 'tpope/vim-fugitive' Plug 'tpope/vim-repeat' Plug 'tpope/vim-rhubarb' Plug 'tpope/vim-sensible' Plug 'tpope/vim-speeddating' Plug 'tpope/vim-surround' Plug 'vimwiki/vimwiki'

Echoing the other replies here that idk what breakages this refers to. I switched since I liked lua better than vimscript (after writing a ton of vimscript). I don't use many plugins; the few I use haven't broken. Only encountered a single (non-serious) nvim bug that wasn't also a vim bug in many years of use.

I use maybe 10 plugins. I update them whenever I update nvim which isn’t all that often. Rock solid.

neovim is what happens when the javascript kids decide to "improve" one of the best editors ever created. The entire Lua ecosystem standing on 50 unstable plugins that provide the entire kitchen sink, yet do not even have a 1.0 version is nightmarish.

Follow any guide and either everything breaks, or you get an hodgepodge of automagic popups, stuff that autodownloads, flash messages and useless features that are completely antithetical to the slim, minimal philosophy of vim.

At least the original vim is still around, and the js kids are allergic to parens so there's an alternative.

I am not a JS dev, and still prefer nvim. If you’re careful with plugin choices, you can get nice QoL features and still be stable. I can’t think of a time when I’ve had nvim crash.

You’re correct that random guides are generally garbage, but by reading plugin docs (gasp), you can generally get stuff working without much fuss.

What on earth are you talking about?

When I was looking for an editor that supported true color themes, neovim supported them, vim didn't. That decided what I was going to use. Stability is good, but if you need a feature that's not there - stability isn't helping.

>neovim is what happens when the javascript kids decide to "improve" one of the best editors ever created

I don't think that's accurate. Now, if OTOH you said "the Lua kids" then I'd probably agree.

There are no Lua kids, i.e newbie programmers that start their career from Lua. The neovim Lua kids were JS kids all along, and brought their philosophy of churn over.

I find this to be an interesting theory, but where is the evidence for it?

Follow up: it would be interesting to see the raw numbers of how many JS Kids have transferred over to Lua development.

Neovim is perfectly usable without installing 50 plugins.

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