NeoVim

The text editor for those who want speed and features.

I’ve been a long-time user of vim (and have dabbled with emacs). But it’s really only been the last 2-3 years that I have make a serious commitment to learning more of vim’s features.

I thought I had gotten my vim configuration to where I didn’t need any further changes (ahahaha). Then I began to feel like vim was slowing down. Trying to run lint checkers would cause vim to block. What I wanted in an editor, vim no longer seemed to have. Emacs began to look like an option…

About a year ago, I helped support a vim fork - neovim. It’s goals were to clean up large portions of the vim code, and put asynchronous support in (among other features). Well, fast-forward to this month, and I’ve switched to using neovim completely. Surprisingly, I now use fewer plugins, but with greater effect.

Neovim feels consistently faster than vim, and some of the quirks with screen redraws seem to be gone in neovim. The neomake plugin that allows for asynchronous tasks is awesome. Running python linters in the background is faster than running them in vim ever was. It’s impressive how much better neovim is than vim.

One of the additional features - a built in terminal - is something I thought I wouldn’t use, since I start everything within tmux sessions, but I was wrong. Being able to pull in text from the terminal straight into neovim is something I have quickly become used to having available.

If you’ve ever tried using vim, or you are a very experienced vim user, give neovim a try. It’s much faster, has additional features and it supports almost all of the existing vim plugins.