What’s people’s thoughts on the vim and neovim separation?
After being away from vim for a while, and never being a power user, I came back and opted for neovim because scripting with lua just makes sense to me. But the split feels uncomfortable.
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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I was using vim since 2009 or so, and at the time I had no complaints about it other than it felt heavy. So when neovim came out I tried it and... it felt pretty much the same.
Then I learned about vis and never have looked back. It still has things I wish it had respect to vim/neovim (i.e. vim-like buffers...) because of its lack of manpower in development, but otherwise it's really snappy and the structural regex thing is so great. Oh and it has lua scripting support too.
The separation is from a time, when some community members were unhappy with the single dictator of Vim. Reworks like multi-threading system in example lead to the new fork. The reason I switched to Neovim is 2 years ago (Edit - Note to myself: It's been longer than 2 years...) or so, when I had a buggy and very slow experience with Vim and a few plugins to program in Rust. It might be the plugins itself that caused this issue, but it was one nontheless and is the main reason why I switched. Since then the Vimscript got revised and improved and lot of improvements were made to Vim itself. I think a bit competition is good.
I don't get it. I got neo just to see how I liked it. The default markup highlighting is nice. I guess I'm not experienced enough to appreciate to Lua part, but I have no nerds to play with so don't know what it's for really.
In the end the lua scripting thing is pretty simple … it’s a language that is general purpose though pretty light weight) and used elsewhere for good reasons. So if you want to learn about scripting your editor, with neovim, the language will be something potentially useful elsewhere. With vimscript, that’s not the case.
And maybe it helps for the dev team to not have to maintain a scripting language on top of everything else?
full Wayland support (including clipboard support)
Woohoo! This limitation has significantly reduced the utility of vim for me in recent times, so it's great to see
What will be the day to day difference? Will you still have to use shift insert to paste?
The "+/"* buffers, I assume.