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Neovim

A modernised fork of Vim with first-class scripting.

Neovim forked from Vim in 2014 with the goals of refactoring the codebase, embracing asynchronous job control (which Vim's plugin architecture historically lacked), and exposing a stable embedding API for use as a library. Lua is the preferred scripting language, with deep integration through the built-in LuaJIT runtime that has enabled a flourishing ecosystem of plugins and personal configurations.

Neovim ships built-in support for the Language Server Protocol (no need for a separate plugin), tree-sitter syntax parsing (better than regex-based highlighting), and a terminal emulator. The plugin ecosystem around Neovim is now larger and more active than Vim's, with package managers (lazy.nvim, packer.nvim) and curated plugin distributions (LazyVim, NvChad, AstroNvim, LunarVim) lowering the barrier to a feature-rich configuration.

Thiago de Arruda started the original fork. The Neovim Foundation now sponsors core developers; the project remains Apache-2.0 with parts under the Vim licence. Neovim has become the editor of choice for many former Vim users who want a more programmable extension surface, and is increasingly the editor new vi-tradition users learn first.

Neovim screenshot
Screenshot: Petr Mach, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

License: Apache-2.0 (some parts Vim License)

Category: Editor

Website: https://neovim.io/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install neovim
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install neovim
Arch:          sudo pacman -S neovim
macOS:         brew install neovim

Authors

  • Thiago de Arruda (original fork)
  • Neovim core team and contributors
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