Neovim 0.12.0
29 points by chaychoong
29 points by chaychoong
Around two weeks ago I started using nvim instead of vim. I never really bothered trying out nvim earlier. I used vim for almost 20 years. I started using it in my Gentoo phase and I can't say I really loved it or that I am a competent modal aficionado. I use it in because it is almost always there locally or via ssh. It was my terminal editor of choice as nowadays I prefer most of the time to use graphical editors where I can set variable width fonts. For most of the mentioned period I was looking for an alternative, but never seriously enough. Yes, the reverse movement-action key set of kakuone makes more sense, but I got used to vim and stayed with it.
So I may be allergic to a mention of vibecoding, but reading here lately about vim getting some LLM commits. That got me to thinking. I thought about a few terminal editors and remembered that I installed (but never used nvim). I checked it out and I have to say I was impressed quickly.
What I like about nvim is mostly sensible defaults. I used to have an extensive vimrc a few years in with vim, but later on I just got a simple vimrc (16 lines of set this or that). Nvim has hlsearch, preview of a substitution, sensible defaults around mouse handling. I like the colors and the style of syntax highlighting and it looks good on a white background terminal (I may be a weirdo :P). With LSP support it really is very easy to get going even further than with vim. My config is just enabling LSP for Python.
reading here lately about vim getting some LLM commits
If that was your reason for switching to neovim I have some bad news.
It was enough a reason for me to bother trying something else. Though I hear you and I am not perfectly happy. All in all it was a painless switch for me, but my main point about not really being happy with vim, just invested, still means I want to switch to something else eventually. However I don't know when I will be again bothered enough to do something about it.
vim-classic, a long-term maintenance fork of vim 8.x with a specific goal of avoiding LLM crap, might suit you. I find it appealing, anyway. If
reading here lately about vim getting some LLM commits
is a motivator, you might also.
Fairly clean upgrade only where I was informed https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter-refactor was now deprecated. Moved to https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter-locals for replacement but need to better understand.
Loaded up a Go file and syntax/colour took a good 800ms to load in. Not good. Time to dive in!