Switching from Neovim to Vim (Again)
Okay, so already I did this dance back in 2017. Looking back, my observations were somewhat shortsighted, but felt decent enough at the time.
A year later, I contemplated the future of Vim once Bram Moolenaar dies. In 2023, we sadly found out what happens, with Christian Brabandt taking the lead.
Since Bram's passing, I've bounced between Vim and Neovim regularly. Frequently enough that I've kept the configuration for both in my dotfiles rather than planting a flag on either side.
Death by Configuration
That was until recently, when I decided to overhaul my very modest plugin list. Most of what I use is stuff for Vim that I like, and continue to use within Neovim.
My thought was, if I'm ever going to commit to Neovim, I need to embrace the
Neovim ways. For me, that meant leaning into nvim-treesitter, nvim-lspconfig
and the like.
I ended up spending an evening removing my old plugins, and building back up around these modern options. I found myself needing to throw more and more configuration into the mix as I debugged each new issue.
As the LOC stacked up, I started to have PTSD about the last time I attempted to do this. The plugins I use just work and this wasn't working out for me at all.
Vim, but make it Lua
After I rolled back my dots, I asked myself an important question:
What problem is Neovim solving for you?
I came up blank. I favor plugins I can use in both since I switch between the two regularly enough. While it's not perfect, Vimscript/VimL has never really been a problem for me.
So for me, Neovim really boils down to the heading of this section. It's Vim, but make it Lua.
Nothing against Lua, but this doesn't solve any problems for me. Because of
that, I dumped Neovim and spruced up my .vimrc a small bit and called it a
day.
Ring Around the Editor
While I don't want to say I'll never use Neovim again, I'm probably not going to use it again. I did formally drop my Neovim configuration from my dots, but it's all versioned, so I can recover it if need be.
If I do come crawling back, I'll have an answer to my question about what problem it's solving for me. Until then, there's no reason to deviate.
That said, with all of this bouncing around between Vim and Neovim I'm starting
to wonder if it's just time to hang it up and give emacs an honest go.
Scandalous, I know.