Hacker News Reader

Comment by toprerules | Hacker News Reader

I've now watched people go from Sublime to Atom to VSCode to Cursor. Truly it's wild how much value I've gotten out of sticking with just Vim and occasionally trimming my config.

I have no desire to move to Neovim. The Neovim community seems hell bent on turning Vim into another Emacs kitchen sink style ecosystem where no one values moderation and everyone is installing 100+ plugins they don't need. I haven't seen a single Neovim feature that actually helps me get work done more efficiently than how I already do it with Vim. Neovim feels like the first step since ed where the lineage has truly gone in the wrong direction.

View on HN

There were always a big group of people who were obsessed about configs and plug-ins. My impression is that once NeoVim appeared all of them moved from Vim to NeoVim so that's why we have the impression about NeoVim being turned into Emacs.

Personally I use almost stock NeoVim (~30 lines config, with 2 tiny plugins, one of which I wrote myself). I find NeoVim to be very close to Vim, but with a few better corners. Things that I like are things like default `gc` operator for commenting and uncommenting portions of code.

I am still on (mac)vim but I think Neovim did at least two things right

1. it made async operations normal (Vim later did it too) which made things like lint-on-save much better

2. lua is better than vimscript which means easier plugin development. This in turn means it's more likely someone makes a plugin for neovim than for vim these days (e.g. newer completion/llm integrations exist for neovim which don't exist for vim)

I don't think "people installing 100 plugins" is a problem with neovim per se, people were installing tons of plugins before too, and "distributions" such as Janus existed before.

"The Neovim community seems hell bent on turning Vim into another Emacs kitchen sink style ecosystem"

Not all of Neovim users do that, I think. My setup is pretty minimalist, other than basic requirements like syntax highlighting, linter... I have no desire to turn it into full-blown IDE like VS or IntelliJ. So no Astrovim, NVChar, Lunarvim etc etc. Just plain neovim. Actually that's the same way I setup vim. Both nvim and vim which shares the same config.

> I haven't seen a single Neovim feature that actually helps me get work done more efficiently than how I already do it with Vim.

I feel that Neovims implementation of LSP and Treesitter is better than in Vim, and Lua is a magnitude better than Vimscript.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com