Neovim 0.12.0

https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/tag/v0.12.0

154•pawelgrzybek•2h ago

Comments

benrutter•1h ago

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?

nicebill8•1h ago

Possibly never: https://0ver.org/

suby•1h ago

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/

kps•1h ago

Maybe when `:!` works the way vi does and POSIX says it must.

Just kidding, that will never happen.

markrian•1h ago

What are referring to, out of interest? Does this apply just to nvim, or vim as well?

PhilipRoman•1h ago

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.

djb-at-durable•1h ago

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.

flexagoon•1h ago

vi compatibility is explicitly a non-goal for neovim

https://neovim.io/charter/

saint_yossarian•44m ago

AFAIK it's mostly about stabilizing the RPC API and Lua stdlib:

https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/20451

mi_lk•1h ago

> - 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

c-hendricks•1h ago

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`).

pawelgrzybek•1h ago

Have a look here. This is incredible guide to the `vim.pack`.

https://echasnovski.com/blog/2026-03-13-a-guide-to-vim-pack....

NegativeLatency•1h ago

It being built in sounds nice, although I have some lines in my config that automatically install lazy if it’s missing.

tekawade•1h ago

Tried to switch but found lazy.nvim better

flexagoon•1h ago

> 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

lawn•54m ago

If you want to replicate the lazy features then it will get verbose. Even using a dedicated plugin for lazy loading it's not as tight as lazy.nvim.

You may argue that you don't need lazy loading, which is fine, but they're not 1-to-1 compatible.

PhilipRoman•1h ago

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?

Jare•34m ago

I imagine you are left with manual dependencies, manual updates, and possibly without lazy loading or portable configuration. That stuff is not strictly necessary and may be easy to roll your own if you're very into it, but it's comfortable to have a standard.

c-hendricks•1h ago

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.

brcmthrowaway•1h ago

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?

wasabi991011•1h ago

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.

brcmthrowaway•1h ago

What do you use?

lawn•1h ago

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.

normie3000•1h ago

What's the FOMO caused by? Asking as a vim user starting to get FOMOOFOMO.

pl-94•1h ago

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!

johnsonjo•1h ago

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

robrain•52m ago

To pile on to the LazyVim love, I recommend this site: https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/

Course and book (free html, available pdf and dead tree). Covers everything I've needed concisely.

NegativeLatency•1h ago

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?

tekawade•1h ago

You can use vim key binding in vs code.

sequin•1h ago

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.

scuff3d•1h ago

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.

aldanor•1h ago

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

lachlan_gray•6m ago

Ymmv, but I have been very happy using classic vim’s “native claude support”

:term claude

It will also expand special characters so you can do something like

:term claude “refactor %”

And Claude starts work on your current file right away. Also your buffers will update with Claude’s edits!

semiinfinitely•1h ago

why put a built-in plugin manager. and if so why make it pack not lazy

TymekDev•56m ago

> The folke/lazy.nvim is the most used plugin manager at the time of this writing. And rightly so: it is very capable with lots of features. Ironically, this itself makes it not very suitable to be a part of Neovim as most of the features come with significant code and maintenance complexity. Plus the whole idea of treating lazy loading as the main goal of a plugin manager does not sit well with Neovim core team.

https://echasnovski.com/blog/2026-03-13-a-guide-to-vim-pack....

shmerl•43m ago

I'd stick to lazy.nvim for now. Lazy loading is really neat and lazy.nvim's ability to specify plugin dependencies isn't something vim.pack has either.

I'd guess if you don't care about lazy loading and OK with just loading everything all the time - vim.pack is great to have.

helterskelter•1h ago

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/

steve_adams_86•1h ago

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.

gesis•1h ago

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.

runevault•1h ago

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.

skydhash•6m ago

There’s an overlap between “Find and Replace” and Macros, but it’s too small for multi cursors to be particularly useful for me. Especially with emacs where I can bring up all the lines in a separate buffer and edit them there (occur-mode) or do the same for a set of files (grep-mode and wgrep)

steve_adams_86•49m ago

I've always told myself I should learn to do these sed/regex find and replace techniques, but my origins are not sophisticated and I use computers like that orangutan hammering nails in the video with David Attenborough https://youtu.be/IFACrIx5SZ0?si=NcWGBNq272KoYB2i&t=84

It's entirely possible that you don't need multiple cursors

bluecalm•1h ago

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.

scuff3d•1h ago

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.

meekins•1h ago

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.

tekawade•1h ago

Lookup helix tutorial. It’s pretty useful.

Iridescent_•1h ago

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

w4rh4wk5•52m ago

Multi cursor support in VSCode replaced 98% of my need for macros. Yes, macros are more powerful, but they are pretty easy to get wrong. With multiple cursors, it's far easier to spot where your inputs don't work out and adjust accordingly.

Multi cursor is the feature that increased my productivity the most across the board.

skydhash•16m ago

Proper macros are vim and emacs one. They have proper movement shortcut that fits both code and prose.

Especially as code is formal notation, such that it’s structured quite rigidly, macros composition can be seen as a meta language. Multi cursors is more suited for the “work hard, not smart”, like preferring litteral search instead of learning regex.

themadsens•50m ago

Whats with all the fuss over multicursor. How is this different from just using '.'

wilkystyle•43m ago

dot repeat is the wrong comparison. A closer one would be macros, but even then a good multiple cursors implementation is often faster, more intuitive, and requires less cognitive overhead. One of the better examples of the usefulness of multiple cursors is from Emacs Rocks (link goes to 0:23):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jNa3axo40qM&t=23s

eviks•45m ago

You'd do text editing with it with the coolest feedback loop - immediately seeing the changes and what those changes apply to beforehand, that's different from having to repeat some macro multiple times

andrepd•25m ago

Multiple cursors were the killer feature that got me to start using Sublime Text back in ~2010. Still an absolute staple of my text editing toolbox. Ctrl-D Ctrl-D Ctrl-D ...

semiinfinitely•1h ago

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.

mihaelm•1h ago

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.

tovej•49m ago

Couldn't disagree more. Why move away from solid, mature build systems to something relatively fringe like zig.

Sadly, this is the general trend with neovim in general: less focus on stability, more and more focus on shiny new things. If I didn't have an nvim config that I'm used to I would have switched to plain vim ages ago.

metaltyphoon•48m ago

> the only way to do this incrementally without the massive friction of a full rust rewrite

Any rewrite is massive friction, I’m sure probably meant port? The only annoyance with Rust ports is if you have to support varargs. Hopefully that will come to an end soon.

toisanji•1h ago

Is anyone using them vim with Claude or any of these coding tools? I want to, but I haven’t found a good workflow.

OliverWich•34m ago

Sidekick.nvim is nice, you get a "real" terminal window on the side with many different agents to choose from.

Either opencode, claude, gemini, copilot, basically most that are relevant :D

Its a pretty light connection-layer, so it helps with sending context.

thayne•21m ago

FWIW, it's also made by Folke, the same developer who made lazy.nvim and snacks.nvim, as well as some other high-quality plugins.

jauntywundrkind•1h ago

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.

shmerl•46m ago

Congrats on diff mode improvements. Hopefully forge style highlighting mode for two way diffs will be available next.

nickandbro•41m ago

If anybody wants to checkout my site to learn the basics of vim. Here it is:

https://vimgolf.ai

I proxy to neovim instances for each level. Still working out some kinks but soon to complete it

awesan•3m ago

Seems like you need an account just to try it.

imjonse•33m ago

It probably goes against Vim tradition, culture and freedom to choose, but I wish they added even more built-in features (like Helix) that are currently implemented in competing and sometimes brittle plugins and have to be put together into also competing vim starter packs and distros of plugins and config files just to have a modern setup out of the box.

skydhash•24m ago

Define “modern”!

Almost all such complaints are close to “I want to be cool and be seen as an haxor, but all I know is a bit of VSCode and IDEA, make it easier for me, plz”.

Sayrus•16m ago

I think what they did with first-party support for LSP would be an example of this.

However, Neovim explicitely states that they don't want to turn VIM into an IDE. The feature parent is talking about seem to be falling into that type of vertical integration instead of composability.

augusto-moura•19m ago

I believe neovim started as a fork specifically to implement features like LSP support and package management, VIM eventually also caught up. But i don't believe anything is out of the table, or against Vim tradition. Which features do you want to see built-in, specifically?

lawn•8m ago

Neovim is actively moving in that direction.

butterlesstoast•30m ago

With all the supply chain attacks this last week, little hesitant to upgrade.

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Neovim 0.12.0

Comments

Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

C++26 is done ISO C++ standards meeting, Trip Report

The Cognitive Dark Forest

More on Version Control

Pretext: TypeScript library for multiline text measurement and layout

The "Vibe Coding" Wall of Shame

Typing and Keyboards

Neovim 0.12.0

The RISE RISC-V Runners: free, native RISC-V CI on GitHub

My MacBook Keyboard Is Broken and It's Insanely Expensive to Fix

Midnight train from GA: A view of America from the tracks as airports struggle

The rise and fall of IBM's 4 Pi aerospace computers: an illustrated history

AyaFlow: A high-performance, eBPF-based network traffic analyzer written in Rust

Show HN: QuickBEAM – run JavaScript as supervised Erlang/OTP processes

Creating West Coast Buddhism (2024)

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics

Police used AI facial recognition to wrongly arrest TN woman for crimes in ND

The Epistemology of Microphysics

LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs

A nearly perfect USB cable tester

Full network of clitoral nerves mapped out for first time

Kyushu Railway Company Train Varieties

Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit

Observations from carbon dioxide monitoring

Netscape News Feed Straight Out of the Late 00s

I turned my Kindle into my own personal newspaper

Show HN: Create a full language server in Go with 3.17 spec support

Show HN: I made a "programming language" looking for feedback

Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor

Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders