How to Switch from Vim to Neovim

March 10, 2015

I just switched over from vim to neovim, and it’s really easy, in fact it’s actually so easy that you can fit it in a tweet, but I wanted to explain the steps I took to switch over.

You can read more about Neovim at the following links:

All you have to do is:

brew tap neovim/homebrew-neovim
brew install --HEAD neovim
cp -rf ~/.vim ~/.nvim
cp ~/.vimrc ~/.nvimrc

But since I have my dotfiles version controlled, I had to do this slightly differently:

brew tap neovim/homebrew-neovim
brew install --HEAD neovim
cp -rf ~/dotfiles/vim ~/dotfiles/nvim
cp ~/dotfiles/vim/vimrc ~/dotfiles/nvim/nvimrc

Then I had to go into my setup.sh and add nvim and nvimrc to the files variable:

files="bin config editorconfig gitconfig gitignore hushlogin oh-my-zsh mutt muttrc nvim nvimrc tmux tmux.conf ttytterrc vim vimrc zshrc zlogin"

Then I ran my setup script to create the symlinks:

./setup.py

Then to launch Neovim, just run:

nvim

Also, you can remove set nocompatible from your .nvimrc because Neovim is always set to nocompatible.

Update Occasionally

Also remember that this isn’t even in beta yet, so you’ll want to update nvim by running these commands:

brew update
brew reinstall --HEAD neovim

And be sure to check out the issues on Github, if you find any bugs.