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Discussion on: Switching from Vim to Neovim

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

Yet I have actually gone ahead and migrated away... to Neovim.

Why?

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matthewbdaly profile image
Matthew Daly

Better support for asynchronous jobs is the main one, although newer Vim versions have narrowed the gap.

Also, the project is a lot more active.

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

Better support for asynchronous jobs is the main one, although newer Vim versions have narrowed the gap.

What does NeoVim do that Vim does not?

Also, the project is a lot more active.

Because Vim is mature and NeoVim is not.

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matthewbdaly profile image
Matthew Daly

Hardly. Neovim is a fork, so to suggest that it suddenly became less mature when it was forked is disingenuous.

It also has saner defaults, APIs for writing plugins using Python or Node.js, and an embedded terminal.

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

APIs for writing plugins using Python or Node.js

Vim supports Tcl, Python 2/3, Perl, Ruby and Racket. Is that not enough for you?

and an embedded terminal.

So does Vim (when compiled with +terminal).

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matthewbdaly profile image
Matthew Daly

Neovim always has the terminal - there's no question of it needing to be compiled in explicitly, so you will never be caught by your Linux distro not compiling it in.

The Python API client is the reference implementation, but since it's RPC based it's language agnostic, and there are a wide range of clients.

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

so you will never be caught by your Linux distro not compiling it in.

That's a solvable problem...

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matthewbdaly profile image
Matthew Daly

Not really. What if you have to use a specific distro on a server due to client requirements? Happened to me this year.

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

I never had the problem of having to use Linux (or even one special Linux) for anything - but I doubt that the client disapproves having a compiler installed.

(Chances are that the "huge Vim" of the specific distro has terminal support anyway.)

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matthewbdaly profile image
Matthew Daly

It probably does in most cases, but because Neovim doesn't require stuff like that to be specifically enabled, you can guarantee it's there.

Ultimately the presence of Neovim is undoubtedly a good thing. It provides an alternative to Vim that's extremely easy to migrate to seamlessly. Also, the mere fact that it exists has spurred development along similar lines - Vim has been adding features that were pioneered by Neovim, so even if you stick with Vim you'll see some benefit.

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

I've also yet to do anything in vim where I thought, "I wish this terminal I'm using was inside my text editor"

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matthewbdaly profile image
Matthew Daly

I'm told the typical use case is a REPL, which makes sense to me, but haven't had the occasion to try it