I’ve been using vi/vim since 2005. 19 years is a long time to use an editor, and switch. It was good knowing you vi, but it’s time to move on to bigger and better editors.
Just kidding, I’m moving onto neovim, the latest and greatest vi derivative, here’s why:
vi/vim have served me very well for text editing and integrate nicely into the unix shell. However…vi/vim are not made to be extensible. vimscript is an awful hack. They’re made to edit text and they do that well, but nothing more, which in the 80s and 90s was the right choice.
But now, in the 2020s, text editors need some level of extensibility to handle integrations with things like static analysis tooling and genAI. Text is not just edited in isolation, but in coordination with feedback from various daemons. Here, neovim shines as neovim is an extensible vim. A vim you can plug things into.
By 2024 i…