What is the value proposition for moving from vanilla vim to neovim? I see all the features on the neovim repo, but almost all of them seem aimed at developers rather than users. I've considered switching, but I'd have to move to a .nvimrc or something, update my install scripts and Ansible, etc., and I'm not sure what I'd gain from it other than "extensibility". If there are concrete benefits for normal usage, I'd be willing, but I'm not sure what those would be. Am I missing things?
I initially switched because it allowed me to simplify my configuration. This was even before Lua integration was a thing; it had better defaults, and the client/server architecture appealed to me. I also liked the idea of a re-factored, more-modular, possibly faster core application.
Now what's starting to happen is that the plugin ecosystems are diverging. Subjectively, it seems like plugin developers are significantly more productive working in languages that are not Vimscript. Accordingly, Neovim seems to be accumulating more sophisticated IDE-like plugins, and this appeals to me on a personal level.
Now that the remote plugin and Lua APIs (including Tree Sitter and LSP!) are somewhat stable, I expect this productivity and divergence to accelerate. I feel like Neovim will be approaching Emacs "power parity" in the next few years, and that's a very exciting prospect to me.
Now tweaking vim to the behavior I want is no longer learning an obscure language but figuring out what is the behavior I want and coding that using lua and the vim api. With the lua language server vim’s api is very discoverable!
Lua is much nicer for scripting, yes, but support is not there yet. There are a couple missing APIs, and just some overall verbosity that is still being cleaned up and worked on last I checked.
