The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source Why Neovim? (Interview)
Aug 31, 2021
TJ DeVries, core maintainer of Neovim, and Nick Nisi from JS Party dive into the evolution of Neovim, highlighting why it was created as a modern alternative to Vim. They discuss the advantages of Lua for configuration and the powerful integrations of LSP and TreeSitter that enhance coding workflows. TJ also shares his project, Telescope, a fuzzy file finder for Neovim, and emphasizes the collaborative spirit of the community that shapes its development. The conversation showcases the exciting future of this powerful text editor.
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Alias Confusion
- Nick Nisi uses the alias "vim=nvim", highlighting the subtle differences between Vim and NeoVim.
- This alias has been in use for five years, demonstrating a long-term, seamless transition.
NeoVim's Origin
- NeoVim emerged from Tiago Taruda's desire for asynchronous job handling, a feature absent in Vim initially.
- This difference led to a fork, creating NeoVim with a focus on extensibility and modern features.
Shared Heritage
- Despite being distinct projects, NeoVim and Vim share significant portions of their codebase and actively port patches between each other.
- This shared heritage ensures some level of compatibility and ongoing cross-pollination of features.