Instead of Vim: Neovim

Why Neovim is better

• A built-in Language Server Protocol client gives completion, go-to-definition and diagnostics without external plugins doing the protocol work.
• Tree-sitter parsing gives accurate syntax highlighting and text objects based on the code's structure.
• Configuration and plugins are written in Lua, run by LuaJIT, with a documented and versioned API.
• Syntax highlighting, filetype detection, autoindent and autoread are on out of the box.
• The community has moved there. Wikipedia reports almost 102 thousand GitHub stars for Neovim against Vim's 40 thousand, and Stack Overflow's survey has ranked it the most admired development environment for five years running.

When to keep Vim

Keep Vim where it is already installed and you just need to edit a file, such as on servers and minimal containers, and if your config depends on Vim9script, which Neovim does not support.

Switching

Install Neovim and point it at your old config. It reads init.vim or init.lua from ~/.config/nvim instead of .vimrc. Most Vimscript works unchanged. Plugins written for Vim usually work too, and many have Lua equivalents. Run :help nvim-from-vim for the steps.

Watch out

Neovim has no stable major release yet and some defaults and APIs change between versions, so pin your plugin versions. A Lua-based setup can grow large. Distributions such as LazyVim help, but add their own moving parts.

Also worth a look

• Helix A modal editor with language servers, tree-sitter and multiple cursors built in and no plugin system yet; pick it if you want an IDE-like setup with no configuration and can learn a different key model.