How to understand Neovim completely?

Question

When I use Neovim, I need to (know I can) understand it completely to make myself comfortable.

I switched from Vim so I searched for the help manual. Just like Vim, I get the user manual and reference manual. So I know I can understand Neovim-as-Vim very well.

But how can I understand Neovim-as-Neo? I need to know what Neovim changed from Vim and why it did and how. Then I think I can understand Neovim very well. After that I can modify it for myself and I can feel comfortable.

How can I do that and where can I start?

Answer 1

Neovim is a fork of Vim. It is very similar to Vim and brings also some changes. Most of the commands and actions are the same with very small variations.

If you know Vim you know Neovim and are ready to switch.

Neovim and Vim have made different choices about the next 'VimScript' version:

• Neovim has selected the standard Lua language
• Vim has introduced VimScript9

It is now possible to configure (optionally) Neovim using Lua scripts instead of Vim scripts.

There are a number of plugins that are written in Lua and are only available to Neovim.

If you switch to Neovim you can start playing with these Neovim plugins. Here are some examples:

• telescope
• treesitter
• dashboard
• nvim-cmp
• packer
• gitsigns
• ...

You could be interested to the following questions about the Vim to Neovim differences and the transition from Vim to Neovim:

• What is Neovim, and how is it different from Vim?
• Abandon Vim and adopt Neovim - hard reasons for not doing so?

If you decide to migrate your configuration from .vimrc to init.lua (what I didn't do) here is some document that could help you: Getting started using Lua in Neovim