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Comment by qalmakka | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: why would anyone use Vim and not NeoVim nowadays? I've switched what, 12 years ago? And I've never had to look back. Just curious, to be honest. Especially since neovim is full of new features, while the Vim9 scripting language kind of tanked

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I'll field this one as someone who has used regular ol' Vim for ~18 years and never switched. Why switch if your tool is working fine? I use vim literally every day all day long and it does everything I need it to do. Switching has a cost and there's no reason to pay it if it's working fine.

I originally switched because neovim was more polished, had better plugins and Lua config files. I then never had a reason to go back

I think I first switched because neovim supported the XDG config location, I could have ~/.config/nvim/init.vim instead of ~/.vimrc.

I ended up switching for plugin support. Other than that, unless you want to use Lua for your config files, I don't see a reason to switch either.

Because I don't choose what tools are available on every server at work, and it's guaranteed that at the very least old-school vi is installed on every linux server, and often vim. Maintaining that muscle memory is useful.

I used to think this too, but I routinely switch back and forth between neovim and vim now for close to a decade, and I've never noticed. In fact I often don't even notice which one I'm using unless I explicitly check. Once you add neovim-only plugins that can change of course, but if you can't choose what tools are available on the server then I would imagine you're not installing plugins anyway.

One reason might be how off-putting the Neovim community is, hijacking Vim discussions to denigrate an all-time-great, beloved work of technology and its creator (who did decades of work for free, gave it to the world, and gave any money to actual orphans) all for Neovim users'/devs' own egos, promotion, and obsession. Almost all of Neovim was made by Moolenaar, from concept to execution, and I don't know that I've ever seen any gratitude.

I've never seen Vim users do that. If I had to choose, I'd use Vim.

Just want to say that although I don't use either Vim/Neovim, I feel grateful for what Vim has done. Vim keybindings can be used by a multitude of editors and you can even have the keybinding concept into browsers and other software's.

Its truly revolutionary when one thinks about it how much impact Vim has on terminal users.

(Neovim's plugin system is nice but I agree with ya that I also feel like some aspects of community often don't appreciate Bram because of the Vim vs Neovim thing from my observation) It's best if instead of treating it as Vim vs Neovim, we use the tools that we prefer and appreciate the tools other are using too and the contribution of one in another. Appreciating Vim doesn't make your appreciation for Neovim lesser, appreciating both can be great. Something which is hard within Editor space in general.

Rest in peace Bram.

Can't say I really interact with the "community", I installed the program and I use it a lot. I am grateful for the existence of vi and vim. I now use neovim where I can. vim or vi as needed.

I use both gvim on linux and macvim on mac for a lot of things--not 'real' coding, typically, but opening and editing scripts and config files, writing in markdown, etc; I'm usually opening these from dolphin or finder. In the terminal, working on real code bases and not scripts, I use neovim. My configs for these have diverged a bit over the years but since the use cases are different, it doesn't bother me.

I didn't switch because there was no reason to. And there is still none.

Have you ever called neovim inside a venv? Didn't work for me (or maybe I'm too lazy to jump hoops, if vim is working out of the box).

muscle memory mainly, I guess?

Sure, switching might not be that troublesome, but I can tell you the first 48 hours or so will be painful, you'll insert stray ":" and "i" characters everywhere :)

I barely use vim these days, and I still do that in every text editor.

gvim?

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