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Switching from Vim to Neovim

Matthew Daly on September 09, 2018

I honestly thought it would never happen. I've been using Vim since 2008, and every other editor I've tried (including VSCode, Emacs, Sublime Text ...
 
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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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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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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

 
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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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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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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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Daniele Scasciafratte

I don't understand the difference between ncm and deoplete :-/

 
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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.