Neovim

August 2026 status: Neovim stable is the 0.12 line, most recently 0.12.4 on GitHub Releases. The site FAQ lists stable as 0.12. Highlights in this line are built in LSP, Tree-sitter, first class Lua, and the 0.12 ui2 work that removes the old Press ENTER to continue prompts. Nightly builds report 0.13.0-dev. On a Mac you install from Homebrew with brew install neovim, from the official arm64 and x86_64 archives, or via a config starter such as LazyVim or kickstart.nvim. The editor is free under Apache 2.0 with parts under the Vim license. It is still the modal editor people pick when they want IDE features without paying Electron memory costs. Neovim is Vim rebuilt for a modern setup. It keeps the motion language that makes Vim fast, the way operators, motions and text objects combine, and it replaces the internals with an asynchronous event loop. That change is why plugins no longer freeze the editor and why tooling can run without blocking you. The practical split from Vim is Lua. Vimscript works, but it is a niche language for a single editor. Neovim lets you write your config in Lua, a small general purpose language with real tables, modules and error handling. Your init.lua is code that runs inside the editor. You import modules, set options, define keys and load plugins through lazy.nvim, which lazy loads plugins and gives you a small UI for updates. The built in LSP client is what turns Neovim into an IDE. Point it at rust-analyzer, typescript-language-server or gopls and you get completions, diagnostics as you type, go to definition, find references, rename and code actions. Tree-sitter handles highlighting, folding and structural selections, and both systems run in separate processes so typing stays responsive. That split is why the editor can handle a large project grep or a language server restart without freezing the buffer you are editing. The 0.12 line also tidied default options so a bare install feels less surprising on first open.