Neovim has become very popular as a replacement for plain Vim. Most advice about moving to Neovim is centred around the LSP and Lua features, but I don’t care about those. This post explores a few other reasons you might want to switch to Neovim.

Better Cursor

In Vim, regardless of what mode or context you’re in, the cursor is always the same. Usually the terminal’s default block cursor.

In Neovim, the cursor changes to a vertical bar in Insert mode, and changes to an underbar when you’re in a character context like replace.

This seems a very minor difference, but it made a big difference to me, notably helping determine where text would be inserted when I entered insert or append.

While you can apply a similar thing with plain Vim using ANSI escapes, I couldn’t get those working in tmux, despite many cryptic settings copy-pasted from StackOverflow.

I didn’t realise how much I loved this feature until I had it. Now I’d be very unwilling to give it up.

(according to codekoalas this is actually the guicursor feature of GVim)

Yank Persistence

For those who use Vim in tmux, it’s always been a pest to have one Vim instance open and wish to yank/paste across to another Vim instance in another pane/window/session.

This “just works” in Neovim.

As an added bonus, you can even yank something, quit the editor altogether, open a new editor, and paste - and that works too!

While it’s possible to work around this with the system clipboard in Vim, Neovim’s native persistence does this better.

Built-in Terminal

In Neovim you can run :terminal and a buffer is opened with a terminal emulator. You can even open a command directly in a split like :vsplit term://top:

You can enter insert or append mode to run commands, then when you have output ready you can Ctrl+\ Ctrl+n to return to Normal mode.

If that’s too much to remember, the help suggests a more normal binding:

if has('nvim')
    tnoremap <Esc> <C-\><C-n>
endif

Now the terminal buffer is treated like any other text buffer in Normal mode.

I regularly switch between editor and terminal in my work, copy and pasting between the two, but I’d really rather use Vim full-time. I’m looking forward to using this more.

Proper VSCode integration

I like to dabble in Visual Studio Code, though it usually ends up annoying me. Anyway.

It has a Vim emulation plugin which is sort of like Vim but not quite, and you can’t use actual Vim plugins in it.

However, the neovim plugin isn’t an emulation, it’s actual real Neovim.

This means all your plugins and config work just like a real editor.

This is possible because Neovim completely decouples the frontend and backend of the editor, so the editor can be embedded anywhere.

You don’t have to switch entirely

There’s a lot of info out there about rewriting your config in Neovim’s native Lua, but I still have to SSH into systems where Neovim isn’t available and I can’t (or can’t be bothered) getting the latest Neovim working.

But that’s fine.

Front-and-center on the documentation page is :help nvim-from-vim which guides you through using your existing ~/.vimrc and everything else right in Neovim.

So I can keep the same VimScript config for places where I don’t have Neovim, and I can use all the above handy features in places where I do have Neovim.

Best of both worlds.

Which I guess is what this post is all about - using Vim but getting something even better. That’s what Neovim is all about!