Vim vs. Neovim

> I'm using vim for a long time now, but recently I heard that neovim is noticeably faster. Is that true?

Neovim is faster; of course, YMMV. Even if you use Neovim just like Vim, it's snappier—the refactor resulted in 30% less code.

> Have most folks switched to neovim by now? Should I care?

There's two broad groups. Users who have been using Vim for like 20 years and they have a configuration they like and see no reason to change.

The other group wants all of the new hotness of Language Server Protocol, tree sitter, everything's asynchronous, there's a proper API and lots of new plugins that wouldn't be possible using Vimscript, for the most part.

Check out https://neovim.io/doc/user/vim_diff.html#nvim-features for details.

Being a Vim (now Neovim) user for close to 20 years, Neovim has attracted lots of new people to Vim-style editors and they've brought lots of energy. There's also been quite an influx of VS Code users.

Neovim is not an IDE, but it can support many IDE-like features via plugins written in Lua. There are several Neovim distributions, which you can install quickly and play around without committing to anything [1]. LunaVim, LazyVim and AstroVim are popular Neovim distributions.

It's important to understand that your existing .vimrc will Just Work if you want to start with that.

[1]: https://github.com/rockerBOO/awesome-neovim#preconfigured-co...

I use whatever is linked under "vi" on my PATH. I just checked, and it's vim. My usage of the editor is pretty basic and I haven't felt that vim is slow, so I haven't looked at neovim.

~12 years with Vim, here. Neovim doesn't solve any problem _I_ might have with Vim so _I_ never considered switching. Should _you_? Only you can tell. Test it out and see for yourself.

In my opinion, the huge delta between TextMate and Vim easily justified a switch, back then, but the differences between Vim and Neovim are way too marginal. If you are big on plugins, maybe, but I am not, so YMMV.