NeoVim is Overhyped, Vim is Criminally Underrated
I think NeoVim is extremely overhyped, while Vim — especially gVim — is drastically underrated. NeoVim changes hyper‑actively together with its plugins, so something that worked one day might stop working the next because of constant updates. Because of this, maintaining it can be a complete nightmare, even if someone is a Lua prodigy. In contrast, classic Vim is stable, reliable, and rock‑solid.
What makes NeoVim appealing compared to Vim is that it’s full of flashy plugins, but in reality most of those plugins are completely unnecessary for real projects. Plus, NeoVim users conveniently forget to mention that almost every important plugin has a proper equivalent in Vim. For example: Telescope → fzf.vim, nvim-tree → NERDTree, lualine → vim-airline, commenting → vim-commentary, surround → vim-surround, Git → vim-fugitive. And they’re much more straightforward. Thanks to Vimscript, configuring Vim is far easier than mindlessly copying Lua code. And there’s coc.nvim available for classic Vim as well, which can turn Vim into a very powerful IDE.
I’m sticking with gVim even if it’s probably the most despised version of Vim (in my opinion completely unjustifiably). Thanks to the GUI, it’s much better than a terminal program because it doesn’t depend on the terminal, and copy/paste from the clipboard works simply and flawlessly — exactly how a text and code editor should.
It’s a bit like how Arch Linux users tend to look down on Debian users, regardless of the fact that Arch isn’t exactly stable — it’s just well‑hyped and more rapidly developed, but it also breaks more easily. Meanwhile Debian is solid and stable.