Speaking solely as an outsider to the development of Vim, NeoVim, and Vim extensions - the only time I see references to NeoVim anymore is when someone else brings up regular Vim (and always includes the narrow-sighted rant of "vim is obsolete, neovim is the future").

Threads here imply that NeoVim has a lot more traction and capabilities than Vim, yet it might as well not exist for all that we don't hear about it.

> that'll be the end of old Vim

To be frank, no, it won't. Not so long as Vim is installed by default, and holds the name Vim. NeoVim can't even simply replace Vim as the default, since it works differently (the changed configuration path, for one), and no longer works on all of the platforms that operating systems are installed upon (even if intentionally).

Vim just works. Until that is no longer the case, NeoVim will have a hard time gaining traction outside of those who are already waving its flag.

That said, I appreciate NeoVim - if for nothing else - for prompting Bram to realize there are more usecases. But I would argue that its time has passed, as bright as that time was.

Neovim is objectively better in numerous ways. I don't need to list them here because a Google search should suffice.

It should be said that people who use Neovim often use the word Vim to keep it understandable and not seem annoying.

> Not so long as Vim is installed by default, and holds the name Vim. NeoVim can't even simply replace Vim as the default, since it works differently

Something about this comment (perhaps the above quote) makes me think that perhaps neovim will be to vim, what vim is to vi...

Vim never needed async, it Just Wo ESC j j j j jjj ESC rks(TM):q :wq

Why would it be the end of old vim? I've never used neovim and I don't plan to use it, vim is perfectly fine for me, as it is. I guess, most of vim users don't even know of neovim. Sure, it's good to have a choice.

A lot of other comments make related points that kind of dance around this, but here it is: The major improvements of neovim aren't (directly) user facing. It's a major refactor, which makes it immensely easier to maintain and contribute too. Neovim isn't a vim reinvention, it's a vim renewal.

What I think is interesting here is that Neovim is entirely contrary to the original point of Vim, as presented in the article: a vi available on non-Unix systems. It was portable, so it could be run anywhere. Now Neovim's selling point is that it DOESN'T have all the code that enabled that portability.

Not suggesting one way is better or worse, but I think it's interesting.

For me the major improvement is that it puts the settings in the .config folder. I like this because I keep my settings in a git repo.

The main advantage on the other hand is that my friend stopped bothering me about having to switch to neovim, which I guess is a non-issue for most. Now he's trying to get me on to zsh.

I've kept pretty much all my settings in a git repository for years -- you don't need the program to explicitly make that easier.

    $ git clone <<repository_url>> $HOME/config
    $ ln -sf $HOME/config/vim/vimrc $HOME/.vimrc

It's not the end of vim. I highly doubt NeoVim is going to replace it at all.

I've never touched neovim as I'm perfectly happy with vim - what reasons are there for me to consider making the switch?

I would guess neovim isn't even on the radar of most vim users. I don't see neovim surpassing vim any time soon, personally.

The honest truth is that almost everyone will have the same exact experience in neovim as in vim, and that the differences right now (this could always change) are mostly for developers hoping to use vim in a creative way. For example, nvim has a decoupled back end, so ides could emulate vim without having to do emulation at all -- they would literally just communicate with the neovim backend. Another example, which I think is great, is that to support python extensions, nvim does not need to be recompiled. A third one, which is perhaps the least valuable but is also the most user-facing, is that you can now open terminals within neovim. Of course, you can do this with vim and tmux, but sometimes it's nice that I can set up a binding for <leader>-t to open a terminal, or <leader>-p to open an ipython shell instead of using tmux's more cumbersome default bindings. That said, there are of course ways to set up fantastic tmux bindings, I just haven't.

I love neovim, but the idea that "most people use nvim" or "vim is dying" is just wrong. Though I really do think nvim's development philosophy will lead to better results than Moolenaar's.

What's really useful about the inbuilt terminal is that it's hooked up to the job control bits, which lets you do things like feed chunks of text to whatever happens to be running in it. I've got this set up as an operator[0] (fair warning, it's been a while since I've tested this much, and there are a few things it could probably do better), which is handy for, as an example, running python/irb/whatever in the terminal and sending function definitions to it as you write them.

EDIT: For the sake of being equal-opportunity, you can do the same thing in emacs with make-comint, even down to having it as an operator if you're using evil-mode. Y'know, whatever you're into.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/Wibjarm/5ae4c4da57bd034d15123cd8edad...

Neovim's popularity is more with extension developers. My understanding is that it enables them to develop features rivaling those in IDEs. Vim users won't switch for Neovim itself, but they might if extension writers only target Neovim.

I think Neovim also has a pluggable engine, so IDE vim emulators can simply include that portion rather than implementing the functionality per platform.

This was true for a while, but vim 8 (and some of the last patches of vim 7) added async tasks, channels and built-in JSON encoding/decoding. It's a hassle to have to support two different interfaces, but I suspect most plugin authors are going to do that rather than force their users to use neovim. Some plugins (like neomake) already support both.

Edit: Forgot to mention, many of the improvements in vim 8 were clearly in reaction to Neovim's innovations. Both projects benefit from the other, this isn't a fight to the death.

Can you name a couple of extensions that somebody considering Neovim should look at?

neomake (async execution of tasks like compiling, linting and syntax checking) and deoplete (for async autocompletion).

Neovim's async already has tremendous plugin support and is most obviously felt in new build plugins like neomake that do async linting--no more locking up the interface on saving, and this already works well.

Neovim's embedded terminal also works great and is something vim doesn't have.

Neovim is simple to try out because it's a drop-in replacement--all your old plugins will likely work out of the box, along with your .vimrc.

> what reasons are there for me to consider making the switch?

There are numerous improvements and features but I'll not talk about them. It has the momentum. Hundreds of developers are contributing to it. That should be the biggest reason to switch as it directly means Neovim will be much healthier than Vim which lacks the momentum.

If you want to know more about what exactly Neovim is doing on the technical side, I suggest you read up the 7 newsletters [0] since the inception of Neovim.

[0] https://neovim.io/news/

Features might be a compelling reason to switch. The fact that something is furiously developed by hundreds of developers is a very poor reason. What does this rather meaningless "health" of Neovim gives to the end users? Fresh new bugs?

I'm not arguing that there are no good reasons to try Neovim. I just don't see any logic in your argument. You speak about loosely defined "health" and "momentum" as if there was a clear link between software quality and amount of buzz around the project.

> The fact that something is furiously developed by hundreds of developers is a very poor reason. What does this rather meaningless "health" of Neovim gives to the end users? Fresh new bugs?

It's not like Neovim (or any open source project) is an open house where anyone can come, throw some code over the wall and get it merged. Like any big project (Vim included), it is being maintained by a set of core responsible developers who know better. Neovim has a huge focus on automated tests and CI also. I don't see any reason why a big contributor base should make the end product worse.

> I just don't see any logic in your argument. You speak about loosely defined "health" and "momentum" as if there was a clear link between software quality and amount of buzz around the project.

Of course there is. Look at Linux, ReactJS, Docker, Kubernetes, Ubuntu, Firefox. The more momentum a project has, the more contributions it gets. Open source projects succeed because of the community around them.

GNU Hurd was not able to gather momentum and look where it is today. Contributors flocked to Linux so it flourished.

> The more momentum a project has, the more contributions it gets

that's not disputed. the question is, what specific impacts do these contributions have on me, the user? why should i, a user of vim, switch to neovim?

async plugins? true color support? If you have a 32-bit color capable terminal you can use any colorscheme and get real RGB colors.

Those are very good and appealing features. Nobody questions that. On the contrary, the point is that those features are meaningful and valuable for the users. The amount of code and people used to implement them is not.

That got me: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/FAQ#how-can-i-change-t...

It feels faster to me, but I haven't compared to vim 8. I don't use any plugins doing work in the background, so that's not the difference here.

you can do that in vim as well http://pastebin.com/LLm0tx88

TBF that is non standard behavior and won't work everywhere.

That's interesting! I guess, neovim's behavior is just a convenience wrapper around this, then.

You must be living in a bubble tbh. I am using vim for 12+ years now and it is perfectly fine.

Vim is fine but Neovim is better and judging from the community involvement, will keep getting better at a much faster rate than Vim.

Vim is stagnant (or was?) which is fine for most users but sucks in the long run.

Would vim 8 have async if neovim did not exist? No, because it was fine without it.

From a Windows user point of view neovim is strictly than vim 8 / gvim 8.

Can't edit now but that was meant to be "strictly worse"

Yes, this. My primary work environment is Windows. Every attempt to install and successfully use neovim has been far from optimal and sometimes flat out broken. So I go back to gVim.

vim is great, but neovim is better. Of course these days I'm a spacemacs proselyte. On my dev box spacemacs and neovim is used interchangeably. On most servers I just stick with the default distro vim, unless it becomes a remote dev machine.

Point is I use all three all the time, and I fully expect to continue doing that until world hunger or me ends.

Plus 1 for spacemacs. Magit is amazing software and I held out for a long time learning it because I didn't think that it was worth the time. It's so good that it makes you rethink version control. Makes everything so easy... Even the more advanced features.