[openmarkand]

I have tried several times and I always switched back to vanilla vim. Neovim has various nice features but it requires a lot of time to migrate correctly IMHO. 20 years of habits are hard to leave, I think.

Sure the configuration file is retro compatible, but some of the plugins are better suited for neovim and vice versa. I use a dozen of them and if I switch permanently to neovim I'd like to start fresh using more "modern" alternatives that make use of the newer features.

[myaccountonhn]

I found the neovim community to operate a bit like the node ecosystem, you pull in a plugin for every problem that solves already solved problems their own way. The plugins are also very flashy with tons of animations, colors and emojis, which to me is just distracting. That said I think people should use what they like, and I am happy that there is a big community developing an alternative to VSCode. I just didn't feel it was for me.

I ended up moving to Kakoune. The community is small but the tool is so much better designed and integrates well with unix. That means that i can usually glue together whatever I need myself with 1-3 lines of config and don't need an entire plugin when I want something that isn't built-in.

[openmarkand]

> The plugins are also very flashy with tons of animations, colors and emojis, which to me is just distracting

I also have seen that the very first time I tried neovim. Some people may like it but I consider a terminal to be as simple as possible. Furthermore, I use often the CLI on non-GUI terminals where such non-ASCII characters can have various side effects (e.g. unicode bars, braille like progress bar and so on, those destroy your serial terminal line).

[sevensor]

The Unix integration is so very good. I have keybinds to fmt for line wrapping and date to insert timestamps, and I like being able to pipe a selection to dc to do some quick math. It’s so easy, I do it without even thinking about it.

[sgarland]

> The plugins are also very flashy with tons of animations, colors and emojis, which to me is just distracting.

I don't think I've seen plugins with animations (nor would I want to). Agreed that emoji in the terminal, modulo useful glyphs like language logos next to files in a directory tree [0], are distracting.

What I don't understand are people who add a million plugins, and then wonder why the startup performance is terrible. I have a fair amount, including some I honestly rarely or never need, and startup time is still 75 msec, which is fast enough for me not to be bothered.

[0]: https://github.com/ms-jpq/chadtree

[emblaegh]

When I migrated years ago (mostly to get access to some plugins), nvim gladly swallowed my old configuration with no changes. Then I could change to lua and other modern features at my own pace.

[Flimm]

By "swallowed", I thought you meant that Neovim silently deleted your files. I'm glad the context makes it clear that it didn't.

[fp64]

…I still haven’t switched to lua, all I need still works fine