I swapped to neovim and never looked back. I don't even have vscode, jetbrains or anything similar installed anymore.
AI has made it so so easy to get into neovim and make anything work no matter how obscure it is.
The biggest benefit for me which I haven't realized how good it is with tmux and the low low memory usage. I mean I can keep EVERY project I work on open, quickly switch and maintain.
No more 10gb memory usage on a SINGLE project, no more laggy remote access, no more dreading reboots, no more wasting time.
Kernel panic? everything is right there how you left it, honestly it makes me feel so sad because the poor design of IDE's have been such a show-stopper for a LOT of good project designs that I have completely avoided due to introduced complexities that come not to mention how slow things can become.
Now I can just ssh into my pc from a laptop and work, no synchronization, no need to have a beefy laptop and incredible battery life.
It probably goes against Vim tradition, culture and freedom to choose, but I wish they added even more built-in features (like Helix) that are currently implemented in competing and sometimes brittle plugins and have to be put together into also competing vim starter packs and distros of plugins and config files just to have a modern setup out of the box.
Multi cursor support in VSCode replaced 98% of my need for macros. Yes, macros are more powerful, but they are pretty easy to get wrong. With multiple cursors, it's far easier to spot where your inputs don't work out and adjust accordingly.
Multi cursor is the feature that increased my productivity the most across the board.
Kakoune has replaced many features with multicursor, including the sed-like commands (where you just select an area, search for patterns inside it to create the multiple cursors, then perform regular edits (which also means you can perform much more complex than simple replaces).
It is really useful for refactors, e.g. even if you don't have any LSP (e.g. for plain text) you can easily rename symbols, reorder/select in log files, etc
Looking forward to multiple cursors… but Vim/Neovim can already do some of the common use-cases for multiple cursors, like prepending (or appending) text to a bunch of lines using visual block mode [1].
My favorite thing about Neovim is how easy it is to customize (I know, I know, but keep reading, it's about to get spicier) with LLMs. I got sick of Bear and Obsidian and had DeepSeek bash Vim's head in until it was the todo + calendar app of my dreams. Since OpenCode can easily interact with Vim during the terminal, it can itself test whether its changes work until it meets the criteria I set. No going back.
At this point my dev setup is basically just Neovim, tmux, and a terminal. I ended up removing the usual IDEs because I just was not opening them anymore.
What sold me was not even the editor itself at first, it was the workflow. I can leave sessions running, bounce between projects instantly, and my system still feels light. That matters a lot once you get used to having multiple things going at the same time.
Claude Code also helps a lot with the rough edges. When I run into some niche config issue or weird tooling problem, it is usually fixable in minutes instead of turning into a rabbit hole.
Upgrading from 0.11 was relatively painless, except for nvim-treesitter, which pretty much became a new plugin. The previous version lives in the master branch, but doesn't support 0.12 at all, so you need to use the main branch when updating.
Most of the previous features are replicable with new code, except for incremental selection. treesitter-modules[1] serves as a good bridge between old and new APIs.
Always interesting when a project stays 0 ver for so long- anyone close to the project know what would be considered significant enough for a "v1" release?
Can someone try to sell me this over lazy.nvim? I asked Claude to convert lazy config to pack and I was not happy with it because how verbose it turned out
I've been loving NeoVim with AstroNvim so much. I'd done some editor configuration and it felt daunting and mostly just... didn't. And I was not good about using the leader key, because of tmux to zellij problems, that nothing was discoverable (zellij adds visual overlays to guide you through usage, unlike tmux's memorize everything approach). AstroNvim has changed both of these so much for me: there's excellent community packs (https://github.com/AstroNvim/astrocommunity) that are easy to drop in that have good configuration out of the box for everything you could want to do, and the leader key has a wonderful little bottom-of-screen UI for itself that helps you discover what's available (that astronvim plugins naturally grow/augment).
On Neovim, very exciting and interesting to see 0.12.0. It'll be interesting to see if folks really do migrating and at what speed to the new built-in plugin system. There's still dozens of other still used plugin systems, but LazyVim seems to have really cemented itself as the lead (and is used in AstroNvim). It feels like vim-pack is trying to be lighter still. Will it work? Will it get adopted? Will be neat to see. PR for vim-pack: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/34009
Last, I still dream of a day where neovim headless is capable of running multiple different clients at once. The rpc architecture is so powerful and so amazing. But we're still (afaik) anchored to having once canonical screen, where-as I want to be able to have multiple editors, looking at different views of the workspace, with different layouts, and specialty windows like IDE debuggers in their own layouts. It's hard to dream of neovim disaggregating itself, blowing up the screen.c, but maybe maybe maybe maybe some decade, possibly, I hope.
I'm using VIM - Vi IMproved 9.1. What am I missing?
I'm kind of desperate to switch. Getting massive FOMO from colleagues using VS Code. But I really like using the keyboard to navigate. What should I do?
I unintentionally ran the main branch when testing some changes and a lot of my config broke (mostly around LSPs, CodeCompanion was much slower streaming its responses) so might wait a bit before upgrading.
My #1 issue with Neovim is the new ! Behavior. Anyone know how to make it toggle the alt terminal screen and just output to the primary screen like it does in Vim?
The elephant in the room is that there's nothing quite like Cursor Tab. Copilot, Supermaven, Codecompanion, etc. don't even come close. As much as I want to use Neovim full time, I just can't walk away from Cursor Tab. I can live without Cursor Agent since I can just use Claude Code when I need an agent.
Until something comparable for Neovim comes out, I just don't see how I can switch back. I would happily pay for this. I'm sure there are a lot of people in the same boat as me.
the zig build system is the only thing that actually matters in these notes. nobody maintains a parallel build system for fun—it's a clear signal they're finally pathfinding a way to migrate the core away from legacy c. zig's native interop is basically the only way to do this incrementally without the massive friction of a full rust rewrite. definitely makes nvim feel like a much more serious environment for systems-level performance work.
I recently hit the fold level limit, which is hard coded into Vim at 20. I was disappointed that it's the same in neovim. I tried changing the Vim code and compiling from source but apparently it's not that simple because it still doesn't work (although it does behave differently).
I'm hitting the limit due to a system that uses lists of nested rules or decision trees.
262 comments
AI has made it so so easy to get into neovim and make anything work no matter how obscure it is.
The biggest benefit for me which I haven't realized how good it is with tmux and the low low memory usage. I mean I can keep EVERY project I work on open, quickly switch and maintain.
No more 10gb memory usage on a SINGLE project, no more laggy remote access, no more dreading reboots, no more wasting time.
Kernel panic? everything is right there how you left it, honestly it makes me feel so sad because the poor design of IDE's have been such a show-stopper for a LOT of good project designs that I have completely avoided due to introduced complexities that come not to mention how slow things can become.
Now I can just ssh into my pc from a laptop and work, no synchronization, no need to have a beefy laptop and incredible battery life.
https://neovim.io/roadmap/
Multi cursor is the feature that increased my productivity the most across the board.
Here’s a video example [2]:
[1]: https://neovim.io/doc/user/usr_10/#_visual-block-mode
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/jai57c/the_usefulness_...
What sold me was not even the editor itself at first, it was the workflow. I can leave sessions running, bounce between projects instantly, and my system still feels light. That matters a lot once you get used to having multiple things going at the same time.
Claude Code also helps a lot with the rough edges. When I run into some niche config issue or weird tooling problem, it is usually fixable in minutes instead of turning into a rabbit hole.
Most of the previous features are replicable with new code, except for incremental selection. treesitter-modules[1] serves as a good bridge between old and new APIs.
[1] https://github.com/MeanderingProgrammer/treesitter-modules.n...
> - d21b8c949ad7 pack: add built-in plugin manager `vim.pack
Can someone try to sell me this over lazy.nvim? I asked Claude to convert lazy config to pack and I was not happy with it because how verbose it turned out
On Neovim, very exciting and interesting to see 0.12.0. It'll be interesting to see if folks really do migrating and at what speed to the new built-in plugin system. There's still dozens of other still used plugin systems, but LazyVim seems to have really cemented itself as the lead (and is used in AstroNvim). It feels like vim-pack is trying to be lighter still. Will it work? Will it get adopted? Will be neat to see. PR for vim-pack: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/34009
Last, I still dream of a day where neovim headless is capable of running multiple different clients at once. The rpc architecture is so powerful and so amazing. But we're still (afaik) anchored to having once canonical screen, where-as I want to be able to have multiple editors, looking at different views of the workspace, with different layouts, and specialty windows like IDE debuggers in their own layouts. It's hard to dream of neovim disaggregating itself, blowing up the screen.c, but maybe maybe maybe maybe some decade, possibly, I hope.
I'm kind of desperate to switch. Getting massive FOMO from colleagues using VS Code. But I really like using the keyboard to navigate. What should I do?
Does NeoVim support Claude Code?
https://vimgolf.ai
I proxy to neovim instances for each level. Still working out some kinks but soon to complete it
Until something comparable for Neovim comes out, I just don't see how I can switch back. I would happily pay for this. I'm sure there are a lot of people in the same boat as me.
I'm hitting the limit due to a system that uses lists of nested rules or decision trees.