Kakoune has replaced many features with multicursor, including the sed-like commands (where you just select an area, search for patterns inside it to create the multiple cursors, then perform regular edits (which also means you can perform much more complex than simple replaces).
It is really useful for refactors, e.g. even if you don't have any LSP (e.g. for plain text) you can easily rename symbols, reorder/select in log files, etc
I'm not sure how people typically use neovim, but in Zed I find multiple cursors (especially combined with multiple file buffers) extremely ergonomic for refactoring quickly and easily where tools like find and replace or simple renaming doesn't suffice. It lets you scan through and add cursors where you need them, then perform your edits across locations and even files all at once. It's so nice that it played a significant role in me keeping Zed early on despite it missing a lot of extensions I used in VS Code.
I am so used to sed-style, regex powered find/replace, that this use admittedly never occured to me. As a result, multi-cursor seemed mostly useless outside of pair programming that I never do.
I will have to try it out once it lands in neovim just to see if I can wrap my muscle memory around it.
For me the nice thing about multiple cursors is when it would take more time to write the regex than it does to just throw down say 8 cursors and update the spots.
You have very convenient macros.
If there is something you want to do in places you are going to mark first then you can just execute it right there instead. If it's just one edit you just do it right there without macro and use the dot to repeat it in more places.
If those places can be created automatically then again it's just a macro you execute over many lines.
Really excited about this! At least in Sublime Text I've found multiple cursors a really powerful tool for ad-hoc transformations on snippets of semi-structured text or instantly and visually applying the same edit on multiple similar lines.
It's funny because I miss this one all the time. I got use it in Sublime and VScode before making the jump to Neovim. I know you can get similar functionality from macros and what not, but it's just not the same.
Can someone try to sell me this over lazy.nvim? I asked Claude to convert lazy config to pack and I was not happy with it because how verbose it turned out
I always thought Vim/Nvim already had a built-in package manager, git clone inside ~/.vim/pack/*/start, am I missing anything by not using a "real" package manager?
the zig build system is the only thing that actually matters in these notes. nobody maintains a parallel build system for fun—it's a clear signal they're finally pathfinding a way to migrate the core away from legacy c. zig's native interop is basically the only way to do this incrementally without the massive friction of a full rust rewrite. definitely makes nvim feel like a much more serious environment for systems-level performance work.
It doesn't necessarily mean they're going to migrate from C, building a C project is just so much nicer with Zig than fiddling around with CMake. You got people using it as a build system even for Go projects, especially if they're relying on CGo.
However, if you were entertaining the idea of slowly switching to Zig, the build system would be the place to start. Moving away from CMake is worth it even if you don't push it further.
But yeah, the C-Zig interop story is so good it's a no brainer if you want to "modernize" your C codebase, and you can do so incrementally instead of stopping the world for a rewrite.
Always interesting when a project stays 0 ver for so long- anyone close to the project know what would be considered significant enough for a "v1" release?
In Vim, :! cleans up the tty context and hands it off to the child program, to do whatever it wants, you can open any TUI program and it will work as expected.
In Neovim, :! just uses a plain pipe. Actually I believe GVim has the same problem. Since both Vim implementations now have a built in terminal handling stack anyway, I wonder if that could be used to unify the behavior.
Just nvim. Neovim runs :! commands non-interactively, capturing the output in a pipe. vim, on the other hand, suspends itself and runs the command in an external shell.
This isn't a problem, really, for non interactive commands, but causes issues with interactive ones. I personally prefer vim's approach, though not enough to abandon neovim.
I unintentionally ran the main branch when testing some changes and a lot of my config broke (mostly around LSPs, CodeCompanion was much slower streaming its responses) so might wait a bit before upgrading.
I've been loving NeoVim with AstroNvim so much. I'd done some editor configuration and it felt daunting and mostly just... didn't. And I was not good about using the leader key, because of tmux to zellij problems, that nothing was discoverable (zellij adds visual overlays to guide you through usage, unlike tmux's memorize everything approach). AstroNvim has changed both of these so much for me: there's excellent community packs (https://github.com/AstroNvim/astrocommunity) that are easy to drop in that have good configuration out of the box for everything you could want to do, and the leader key has a wonderful little bottom-of-screen UI for itself that helps you discover what's available (that astronvim plugins naturally grow/augment).
On Neovim, very exciting and interesting to see 0.12.0. It'll be interesting to see if folks really do migrating and at what speed to the new built-in plugin system. There's still dozens of other still used plugin systems, but LazyVim seems to have really cemented itself as the lead (and is used in AstroNvim). It feels like vim-pack is trying to be lighter still. Will it work? Will it get adopted? Will be neat to see. PR for vim-pack: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/34009
Last, I still dream of a day where neovim headless is capable of running multiple different clients at once. The rpc architecture is so powerful and so amazing. But we're still (afaik) anchored to having once canonical screen, where-as I want to be able to have multiple editors, looking at different views of the workspace, with different layouts, and specialty windows like IDE debuggers in their own layouts. It's hard to dream of neovim disaggregating itself, blowing up the screen.c, but maybe maybe maybe maybe some decade, possibly, I hope.
I'm using VIM - Vi IMproved 9.1. What am I missing?
I'm kind of desperate to switch. Getting massive FOMO from colleagues using VS Code. But I really like using the keyboard to navigate. What should I do?
Most of the active development in the ecosystem is done for neovim these days. If you're using barebones vim then yea you probably won't see much difference, otherwise you have no choice
I've been using VIM/NVIM on and off for a while and the one thing that made it stick for me over VSCode was LazyVim [1]. If you're missing out on something IDE like VSCode, but you love vim it's a great way to go (it can take some getting used to so hang in there). EDIT LazyVim is based off nvim by the way. If your more into videos to learn about something this is a good intro to it from Elijah Manor [2]. I have my dotfiles stored on github that I use on my different machines, and use gnu `stow` and `make` to build them and that gives me my specific lazyvim setup free and quickly after just downloading a few dependencies.
If it's just using the keyboard that's holding you back from VSCode, you'll be pleased to know it has plenty of its own shortcuts, as well as a "VIM navigation" mode you can turn on.
I motivated my Cursor-colleagues to switch to tmux+nvim -- they don't use it all the time, but they enjoy the vibe. Claude is running on some tmux pans. Much nicer than VSCode!
Use the Neovim extension for VScode. It requires you to have Neovim installed, but it works way better then the Vim extension since it passes commands to neovim instead of using emulation.
What are you getting FOMO over? Been using Neovim since it forked from Vim and I'm very happy with it.
Lua has been a big boon to advanced configuration and the plugin ecosystem and Neovim supports everything I'd want and more. LSP and treesitter for instance are still better handled by Neovim.
If you dislike Lua (I'm not a fan) I recommend Fennel, but either way it's much better than Vimscript.
As for Claude there are at least two Neovim plugins for it. I use one of them and it works well but I can't remember which.
Up next for 0.13: multiple cursors! I have no idea what I'd do with this feature but it sounds intriguing.
https://neovim.io/roadmap/
Kakoune has replaced many features with multicursor, including the sed-like commands (where you just select an area, search for patterns inside it to create the multiple cursors, then perform regular edits (which also means you can perform much more complex than simple replaces). It is really useful for refactors, e.g. even if you don't have any LSP (e.g. for plain text) you can easily rename symbols, reorder/select in log files, etc
I'm not sure how people typically use neovim, but in Zed I find multiple cursors (especially combined with multiple file buffers) extremely ergonomic for refactoring quickly and easily where tools like find and replace or simple renaming doesn't suffice. It lets you scan through and add cursors where you need them, then perform your edits across locations and even files all at once. It's so nice that it played a significant role in me keeping Zed early on despite it missing a lot of extensions I used in VS Code.
I am so used to sed-style, regex powered find/replace, that this use admittedly never occured to me. As a result, multi-cursor seemed mostly useless outside of pair programming that I never do.
I will have to try it out once it lands in neovim just to see if I can wrap my muscle memory around it.
For me the nice thing about multiple cursors is when it would take more time to write the regex than it does to just throw down say 8 cursors and update the spots.
You have very convenient macros. If there is something you want to do in places you are going to mark first then you can just execute it right there instead. If it's just one edit you just do it right there without macro and use the dot to repeat it in more places.
If those places can be created automatically then again it's just a macro you execute over many lines.
Really excited about this! At least in Sublime Text I've found multiple cursors a really powerful tool for ad-hoc transformations on snippets of semi-structured text or instantly and visually applying the same edit on multiple similar lines.
Lookup helix tutorial. It’s pretty useful.
It's funny because I miss this one all the time. I got use it in Sublime and VScode before making the jump to Neovim. I know you can get similar functionality from macros and what not, but it's just not the same.
Is anyone using them vim with Claude or any of these coding tools? I want to, but I haven’t found a good workflow.
> - d21b8c949ad7 pack: add built-in plugin manager `vim.pack
Can someone try to sell me this over lazy.nvim? I asked Claude to convert lazy config to pack and I was not happy with it because how verbose it turned out
Have a look here. This is incredible guide to the `vim.pack`.
https://echasnovski.com/blog/2026-03-13-a-guide-to-vim-pack....
I always thought Vim/Nvim already had a built-in package manager, git clone inside ~/.vim/pack/*/start, am I missing anything by not using a "real" package manager?
> how verbose it turned out
Verbose? The new plugin manager's interface is literature just vim.pack.add({url}), not sure what is verbose about that
It being built in sounds nice, although I have some lines in my config that automatically install lazy if it’s missing.
I'm assuming there will be something like lazy.nvim built on top of vim.pack. Some of the conventions might go away (ie constantly calling `.setup`).
Tried to switch but found lazy.nvim better
the zig build system is the only thing that actually matters in these notes. nobody maintains a parallel build system for fun—it's a clear signal they're finally pathfinding a way to migrate the core away from legacy c. zig's native interop is basically the only way to do this incrementally without the massive friction of a full rust rewrite. definitely makes nvim feel like a much more serious environment for systems-level performance work.
It doesn't necessarily mean they're going to migrate from C, building a C project is just so much nicer with Zig than fiddling around with CMake. You got people using it as a build system even for Go projects, especially if they're relying on CGo.
However, if you were entertaining the idea of slowly switching to Zig, the build system would be the place to start. Moving away from CMake is worth it even if you don't push it further.
But yeah, the C-Zig interop story is so good it's a no brainer if you want to "modernize" your C codebase, and you can do so incrementally instead of stopping the world for a rewrite.
Always interesting when a project stays 0 ver for so long- anyone close to the project know what would be considered significant enough for a "v1" release?
There is a roadmap and github issue tracking what is needed for 1.0.
https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/20451
https://neovim.io/roadmap/
Possibly never: https://0ver.org/
Maybe when `:!` works the way vi does and POSIX says it must.
Just kidding, that will never happen.
vi compatibility is explicitly a non-goal for neovim
https://neovim.io/charter/
What are referring to, out of interest? Does this apply just to nvim, or vim as well?
In Vim, :! cleans up the tty context and hands it off to the child program, to do whatever it wants, you can open any TUI program and it will work as expected. In Neovim, :! just uses a plain pipe. Actually I believe GVim has the same problem. Since both Vim implementations now have a built in terminal handling stack anyway, I wonder if that could be used to unify the behavior.
Just nvim. Neovim runs :! commands non-interactively, capturing the output in a pipe. vim, on the other hand, suspends itself and runs the command in an external shell.
This isn't a problem, really, for non interactive commands, but causes issues with interactive ones. I personally prefer vim's approach, though not enough to abandon neovim.
I unintentionally ran the main branch when testing some changes and a lot of my config broke (mostly around LSPs, CodeCompanion was much slower streaming its responses) so might wait a bit before upgrading.
I've been loving NeoVim with AstroNvim so much. I'd done some editor configuration and it felt daunting and mostly just... didn't. And I was not good about using the leader key, because of tmux to zellij problems, that nothing was discoverable (zellij adds visual overlays to guide you through usage, unlike tmux's memorize everything approach). AstroNvim has changed both of these so much for me: there's excellent community packs (https://github.com/AstroNvim/astrocommunity) that are easy to drop in that have good configuration out of the box for everything you could want to do, and the leader key has a wonderful little bottom-of-screen UI for itself that helps you discover what's available (that astronvim plugins naturally grow/augment).
On Neovim, very exciting and interesting to see 0.12.0. It'll be interesting to see if folks really do migrating and at what speed to the new built-in plugin system. There's still dozens of other still used plugin systems, but LazyVim seems to have really cemented itself as the lead (and is used in AstroNvim). It feels like vim-pack is trying to be lighter still. Will it work? Will it get adopted? Will be neat to see. PR for vim-pack: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/34009
Last, I still dream of a day where neovim headless is capable of running multiple different clients at once. The rpc architecture is so powerful and so amazing. But we're still (afaik) anchored to having once canonical screen, where-as I want to be able to have multiple editors, looking at different views of the workspace, with different layouts, and specialty windows like IDE debuggers in their own layouts. It's hard to dream of neovim disaggregating itself, blowing up the screen.c, but maybe maybe maybe maybe some decade, possibly, I hope.
why put a built-in plugin manager. and if so why make it pack not lazy
I'm using VIM - Vi IMproved 9.1. What am I missing?
I'm kind of desperate to switch. Getting massive FOMO from colleagues using VS Code. But I really like using the keyboard to navigate. What should I do?
Does NeoVim support Claude Code?
Most of the active development in the ecosystem is done for neovim these days. If you're using barebones vim then yea you probably won't see much difference, otherwise you have no choice
Resist hypes and just use whatever you feel like. Torvalds uses a 40 year old EMACS implementation and that seems to be working for him.
I've been using VIM/NVIM on and off for a while and the one thing that made it stick for me over VSCode was LazyVim [1]. If you're missing out on something IDE like VSCode, but you love vim it's a great way to go (it can take some getting used to so hang in there). EDIT LazyVim is based off nvim by the way. If your more into videos to learn about something this is a good intro to it from Elijah Manor [2]. I have my dotfiles stored on github that I use on my different machines, and use gnu `stow` and `make` to build them and that gives me my specific lazyvim setup free and quickly after just downloading a few dependencies.
[1]: https://www.lazyvim.org/ [2]: https://youtu.be/N93cTbtLCIM
If it's just using the keyboard that's holding you back from VSCode, you'll be pleased to know it has plenty of its own shortcuts, as well as a "VIM navigation" mode you can turn on.
What do you use?
Used neovim and neovide for the last week (also had FOMO) and while they’re good (no major gripes) I ended up going back to macvim.
Are there specific features you’re missing from vscode?
I motivated my Cursor-colleagues to switch to tmux+nvim -- they don't use it all the time, but they enjoy the vibe. Claude is running on some tmux pans. Much nicer than VSCode!
You can use vim key binding in vs code.
What's the FOMO caused by? Asking as a vim user starting to get FOMOOFOMO.
Use the Neovim extension for VScode. It requires you to have Neovim installed, but it works way better then the Vim extension since it passes commands to neovim instead of using emulation.
What are you getting FOMO over? Been using Neovim since it forked from Vim and I'm very happy with it.
Lua has been a big boon to advanced configuration and the plugin ecosystem and Neovim supports everything I'd want and more. LSP and treesitter for instance are still better handled by Neovim.
If you dislike Lua (I'm not a fan) I recommend Fennel, but either way it's much better than Vimscript.
As for Claude there are at least two Neovim plugins for it. I use one of them and it works well but I can't remember which.