I mean, most of those things can be done in regular vim too. I’m probably going to switch eventually, but I haven’t really had any issues with vim that would motivate me to switch, and I haven’t really encountered anything super useful that nvim has that vim can’t also do. Though, I’ll admit lua is tempting, and better defaults are certainly a plus!
For search highlighting, the relevant options are :set hlsearch and :set incsearch. nvim just has those enabled by default. nvim also has a binding Ctrl+L to clear the search highlight. This isn’t in vim by default, but the vim-sensible plugin also adds it.
What do you mean by cw putting a dollar sign? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered that.
Edit: the vim syntax for Ctrl+L got eaten by markdown.
Vim and Neovim are pretty similar at this point honestly apart from the Lua. The only difference I’ve really noticed is that in Neovim, when you :term, it opens the terminal in the active pane, putting the buffer you were working on in background. In Vim, it splits the screen and puts the terminal there. Vim also prompts you to confirm a :e if you haven’t saved the current buffer, even though it doesn’t close it, just puts it in the background (iirc?)
In the original vi, when you cw it doesn’t delete the word right away, only changing the last character of it to a $ so you can see where it ends, to save screen refresh. (This was actually a concern on the 1970s modems on which vi was developed.) When you type, it looks like you’re overtyping the word, but when you go back to normal mode it redraws the line and shows the rest of the line shifted over appropriately, so you replaced the whole word. Vim and Neovim redraw the line with every keystroke, which is not a problem even on today’s shoddiest internet connections, and is much more intuitive. vi only starts to do that once the word you’re typing becomes longer than the word it’s replacing.
I mean, most of those things can be done in regular vim too. I’m probably going to switch eventually, but I haven’t really had any issues with vim that would motivate me to switch, and I haven’t really encountered anything super useful that nvim has that vim can’t also do. Though, I’ll admit lua is tempting, and better defaults are certainly a plus!
For search highlighting, the relevant options are
:set hlsearchand:set incsearch. nvim just has those enabled by default. nvim also has a binding Ctrl+L to clear the search highlight. This isn’t in vim by default, but the vim-sensible plugin also adds it.What do you mean by
cwputting a dollar sign? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered that.Edit: the vim syntax for Ctrl+L got eaten by markdown.
Vim and Neovim are pretty similar at this point honestly apart from the Lua. The only difference I’ve really noticed is that in Neovim, when you
:term, it opens the terminal in the active pane, putting the buffer you were working on in background. In Vim, it splits the screen and puts the terminal there. Vim also prompts you to confirm a:eif you haven’t saved the current buffer, even though it doesn’t close it, just puts it in the background (iirc?)In the original vi, when you
cwit doesn’t delete the word right away, only changing the last character of it to a $ so you can see where it ends, to save screen refresh. (This was actually a concern on the 1970s modems on which vi was developed.) When you type, it looks like you’re overtyping the word, but when you go back to normal mode it redraws the line and shows the rest of the line shifted over appropriately, so you replaced the whole word. Vim and Neovim redraw the line with every keystroke, which is not a problem even on today’s shoddiest internet connections, and is much more intuitive. vi only starts to do that once the word you’re typing becomes longer than the word it’s replacing.