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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

With no config file Neovim is just vim but with mouse mode enabled by default. With Lua and the new APIs it’s much easier to write powerful plugins that do crazy shit and use animation but none of that happens by default, you need to go out of your way to get that kind of action, same as with regular vim.

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It's not, though. A bunch has been stripped out (interactive :!, :view, etc) and time only time will tell how much further they will drift apart.

And as such neovim has dropped POSIX conformance (including things like `:!` as you mention, that I use regularly) and is apparently not interested in it.

I wanted to like neovim for its possibly better lsp integration, but if all I need is an IDE with partial vi emulation, I might as well use VSCode.

Thanks for that. I was thinking of trying NeoVim but I regularly use the `:!` feature to filter (selected) text through Unix utilities – and `:view` if I forget to use the `-R` option when opening a file that I don’t want to accidentally edit, e.g., log files.

:! itself has not been stripped from neovim, it's the "interactive" :! that has been stripped (as the OP said)

i.e if you do :!bash in vim you enter bash in neovim you won't

Thanks for the clarification. That makes sense and seems like a reasonable change to me.

I wouldn't say that `:!bash` is the most illustrative example of its impact. It bites you when you run any command that spits out a prompt, most commonly a [Yn] prompt. You can't use `:!` for these in nvim.

It's true that there are minor differences but 99% of the experience is the same, with Vimscript and Vim plugins alike.

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