Neovim is a fork of Vim that aims to improve upon Vim's out-of-the-box experience and allow for more powerful plugins and GUIs.
Neovim is a refactor, and sometimes redactor, in the tradition of Vim. It is not a rewrite but a continuation and extension of Vim. Many clones and derivatives exist, some very clever, but none are Vim. Neovim is built for users who want the good parts of Vim, and more.
Goals
- Enable new contributors, remove barriers to entry.
- Unblock plugin authors.
- Deliver a first-class Lua/LuaJIT scripting alternative to Vimscript.
- Target all platforms supported by libuv.
- Leverage ongoing Vim development.
- Optimize out of the box, for new users but especially regular users.
- Deliver consistent cross-platform experience.
- In matters of taste/ambiguity, favor tradition/compatibility...
- ... but prefer usability if the benefits are extreme.
Non-goals
- Vim9script (or anything later than Vimscript v1)
- Turn Vim into an IDE
- Limit third-party applications (such as IDEs!) built with Neovim
- Deprecate Vimscript
- POSIX vi-compatibility
