People that use Neovim really like Neovim | More than any other code editor, people using it want to keep using it | 2024 Stacked Overflow Developer Survey
Based on answers to the following question:
Which development environments did you use regularly over the past year, and which do you want to work with over the next year? Please check all that apply.
Neovim is the most admired code editor in the 2024 Stacked Overflow Developer Survey
I'm not surprised at Helix's numbers, either. I wish we could sort by Admired; I think the picture would be more interesting.
Using my newly patented VisualSort, it looks like it'd go:
NeoVim
Visual Studio Code
Rider
DataGrip
IPython
Goland
Vim
Helix
... 27 others
So, in the top 22%. And I think some of the others are cheating & cutting themselves short at the same time, because vim and nvim are fairly indistinguishable, and isn't Goland based on IntelliJ?
What's weird is that I've never heard of Rider or DataGrip[^1], yet Kakoune isn't even on the list.
Sad to see Netbeans sink so far, though; back in the day, when I was a Java developer, it was my favorite, being far lighter weight than Eclipse and having a really decent WYSIWYG GUI designer. Nobody uses Java for desktop apps anymore, though, do they?
[^1] Edit: oh. .NET, and SQL. Well, I guess you could consider both to be programming languages if you squint a bit.
Edit #2: surveys are hard, but I really take exception to their OS survey, which they sum up as "windows is the most popular," and then they have Linux broken up into 5 major distributions, and then yet another catch-all for "other distribution." Windows is just "Windows," not "Windows 11," "Windows 10," "Windows XP," and "other Windows" (although they do break out WSL). And that's not even counting Android. If you add up all of the Linuxes, it's more popular than Windows (by this survey).
I'm sure there are more differences; nvim has plugins written in every language. One reason I stepped away from it is because, for development, I was using a fair number of plugins, and i noticed the starting nvim would launch nodejs, a Python runtime, a Java VM, Lua runtimes... I started to feel as if I might as well be using emacs.
So, yes: you're right. NeoVim has more features than plain vim, including a dozen different plugin managers and the ability to write plugins in almost any language. I meant that, from an editing modality, they're very similar.