Neovim

Overall Rating: ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Verdict: Highly recommended for programmers with good taste.
The modern variant of vim. Apparently the og vim author (may he rest in peace) needed some healthy competition to get the project going.
Heavy reliance on lua, which is nice
Terminal handling was completely revamped. No “sub-shell” in neovim. Run commands in a vim-terminal window instead
- As of 2025, vim terminal still lacks quite a few features. Admittedly they’re not a terminal project (which is complicated enough in itself) but still this makes for some rather subpar experience.

Vim

Used as main editor since ~2001 until switching to neovim in ~2021
Even as early as 2002 I heard rumors saying I can’t program without vim… (which is not that far from the truth)

Consistent text editing experience for 25+ years.
- This is especially in stark contrast to people using other text editors, who stereotypically went from Emacs → UltraEdit → Notepad++ → Sublime Text → Atom → VS Code; changing editors every few years can be a chore.
Allows speed and confidence when editing text.
The value of consistency is much greater than (user) speed. The value of speed of the editor itself (no visible lags in most operations) cannot be understated though.

Impossible to move away from qwerty keyboard
Adjustment needed to use “normal” text editors due to over-familiarity with vim keybinds
Recently (2025) tried helix, and while it was very similar to vim, I realized I couldn’t even temporarily switch to it without messing up my productivity, because I’ve become so dependent on the vim keybinds.
btw, for me personally, I’d rather use default keybinds than so called “vim” keybinds because my muscle memory is activated once I start using vim keys, and any minor deviation will just make me expend conscious brain power asking myself whether I’m in a “real” vim or a “fake” vim-keybind environment.

I’m very light on plugins.

Telescope is one that I use (sparingly). I do have a couple other plugins but I usually configure them to get out of my way.

I do have a “wrapper” around nvim that does some magic (globbing files, opening multiple files, etc.). See magic_open