HACKER Q&A
📣 ctenb

Any Vim users who are sticking with Vim over Neovim?


Do you have any particular reasons to do so?


  👤 imran0 Accepted Answer ✓
Anyone considering to switch should keep in mind that these are projects with very different philosophies.

Neovim is always chasing the shiny new things; while that's exiting it comes with breaking changes, general instability and the possibility of changes that you might not like.

Vim is the exact opposite. You can drop in a .vimrc from 20 years ago it will most likely work fine. It should be noted that this focus on stability does not necessarily constrain innovation (eg. vim9script), it just sets a conservative pace of improvements.


👤 faisalhackshah
Yes. I tried Neovim last year. Spent 1 day, and did not achieve parity with my Vim setup so I abandoned it. A contributing factor may have been: getting distracted with analogous plugins on the nvim side. Now that Bram is gone, I'll take another day or two and switch over sometime this year. I don't have to though. Vim works. It always has. It probably always will.

👤 wruza
The first reason is I’m actually satisfied with vim’s part of what neovim is, so there’s no reason.

But I tried neovim recently. It had worse support for windows (qt-nvim, iirc). It couldn’t rerender or re-column-count itself on resize and also had few other cosmetic issues that I’ve noted but forgot already. One stupidest thing was you can’t explorer-associate it easily in windows because of how parameters get passed between qt-nvim and a host editor process. I regedit’ed it to a working state after a while, but man.

Otherwise I’d try to side-grade to it, but these issues are complete blockers and it’s a little concerning that they weren’t addressed for so many releases.

Maybe something got fixed since, but I only care enough to check once a year or two.


👤 cntrl
Even though I've slowly migrated over to neovim throughout the past ~2 years or so, I still use vim as more of a "general purpose" text editor.

Neovim (mainly due to the amount of useful plugins + lsp support) is used by me as a full featured IDE, which I almost exclusively use for larger coding projects.

For quick scripting or editing of files I use my vim config, which is less bloated and very minimalistic.

The differentation probably doesn't make much sense, but for some reason I like using both.


👤 stefanos82
I have attempted to use neovim, but due to its bleeding-edge development cycle that they often break things, I could not use it even though I have tried really hard.

I have decided to give it time to mature more and become more stable and maybe in the near future I will think about it, at least that's what I said.

Now with the passing of Bram, I have an extra reason to stick with Vim. I plan to study its code so I can start participating in QA-ing the code and help maintaining it in any way I can.

That's the least I can do to show my appreciation and continue his legacy.


👤 ahalbert
Inertia, I guess - I'd have to get it set up and all and vim works fine for me now.

👤 anon7331
I stick with vim. It’s already installed anywhere that matters. Why bother installing neovim? I don’t rely on neovim only extensions.

In my experience, most people using neovim are really turning vim into vscode.


👤 rl1987
I stick with Vim, as it tends to be pre-installed on many Linux systems in the cloud (e.g. Digital Ocean droplets). I get the same on the server as I use on my MBP locally.

👤 kermatt
I use Vim because I found my config for Python development seems to work better on both Windows and Linux, without differences between machines. The former is a job requirement. This is probably because I had a Vim setup that worked, but it needed some work to convert to Neovim that I did not have a reason to invest in.

There are some interesting plugins in Lua, but I don’t need Vim to be an IDE. I use VSCode when that is necessary, I don’t need Visual Studio, etc.


👤 rossdavidh
Vim works just fine, so I have not seriously (yet) considered switching. Not saying this would never changed, just that I have literally not considered switching (yet).

👤 seattle444
Still use vim. I use windows at work so old vim is better. Not sure if it's still true today but vim has better windows support. I remember neovim developers celebrating all the windows code they deleted. Congrats on deleting windows platform support I guess. :-|

👤 advirol
I stick with Vim for the foreseeable future. It is stable and have all I need for my purposes, which is editing config files and shell scripts mostly.

For beginners I would recomment Vim as well because it is good enough for most use cases and is more stable.


👤 inimino
Have used vim with the same vimrc for c. 20 years, probably will continue for the next 20. What I like about vim is that it just works, and any features I don't need are turned off. My configuration is minimalist, only about 20 lines.

👤 rthomas6
I'm using neovim purely for the Telescope plugin

👤 ksherlock
I'm sticking with STeVIe.