Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Evil VS Neovim

Compare Evil VS Neovim and see what are their differences

Evil logo Evil

The extensible vi layer for Emacs.

Neovim logo Neovim

Vim's rebirth for the 21st century
  • Evil Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-04
  • Neovim Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-23

Evil features and specs

  • Vim Emulation
    Evil provides a near-complete emulation of Vim’s features within Emacs, allowing users who are familiar with Vim to transition without losing their preferred keybindings and workflow.
  • Customizability
    Evil allows users to customize their configurations extensively, combining the powerful text-editing capabilities of Vim with the customizability of Emacs.
  • Community Support
    Evil has a large and active community, providing a wealth of plugins and resources to enhance the text editing experience.
  • Mode Integration
    Evil integrates smoothly with various Emacs major and minor modes, allowing users to leverage the full functionality of Emacs alongside Vim's modal editing.

Possible disadvantages of Evil

  • Learning Curve
    For users unfamiliar with Vim, the modal editing approach can introduce a significant learning curve, particularly for those accustomed to traditional text editors.
  • Complex Configuration
    Configuring Evil to fully integrate with existing Emacs setups can be complex and time-consuming, especially when customizing keybindings and behaviors.
  • Performance
    In some cases, using Evil with certain Emacs configurations or plugins may lead to performance issues, such as lag or delayed responses.
  • Inconsistencies
    There might be inconsistencies between Evil’s implementation of Vim features and the original, which could affect workflows for power users who rely on specific Vim functionalities.

Neovim features and specs

  • Extensibility
    Neovim is designed to be highly extensible with a robust API that allows for the development of custom plugins, making it easy to tailor the editor to individual workflows.
  • Asynchronous Plugins
    Support for asynchronous plugins enables smoother and faster performance by allowing tasks like linting and autocomplete to run in the background without freezing the editor.
  • Modern Codebase
    The refactored codebase improves maintainability and introduces new features more efficiently compared to the original Vim.
  • Compatibility
    Neovim maintains compatibility with existing Vim plugins and configuration, making it easier for users to transition from Vim.
  • Improved User Interface
    Neovim provides better support for modern terminal features, GUI interfaces, and offers features like an embedded terminal emulator.

Possible disadvantages of Neovim

  • Lack of Official GUI
    Neovim does not come with an official graphical user interface (GUI), which means users who prefer a graphical experience may need to rely on third-party options.
  • Smaller Community
    Although growing, Neovim’s community is smaller compared to Vim, which means fewer community-created resources and plugins.
  • Learning Curve
    New users might find Neovim’s highly customizable nature and reliance on configuration files challenging, especially if they are not familiar with Vim-type editors.
  • Potential Instability
    Frequent updates and changes can sometimes introduce bugs or instability, which may affect users who rely on a stable environment for their work.
  • Plugin Compatibility
    While most Vim plugins work, some could have compatibility issues or require modification to work with Neovim, necessitating additional effort from the user.

Evil videos

Evil - Season 1 Review [No Spoilers]

More videos:

  • Review - Evil Season 2 Finale Review! (Episode 13)
  • Review - Evil (CBS): Finale/Season 1 - TV Review

Neovim videos

What is Neovim, and why should you care?

More videos:

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Evil and Neovim)
Text Editors
17 17%
83% 83
IDE
18 18%
82% 82
Software Development
12 12%
88% 88
Knowledge Management
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Evil and Neovim. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Neovim should be more popular than Evil. It has been mentiond 108 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Evil mentions (60)

  • Creating an Emacs major mode - because why not?
    For multiple reasons, one of them just being curiosity, I started using Emacs. And before anyone wants to start waging the holy war of editors1, I'll put myself out there and pronounce that the one and only correct answer is: Emacs with EVIL (GitHub) mode. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Helix-gpui: helix gpui front end
    Emacs is whatever you want it to be, and it has wonderful modal editing packages such as evil-mode[1] - which surpasses the editing system from vi that it is based on - and Meow[2] 1. https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
  • Packages that you would like to be in emacs core ?
    Since we already have vyper-mode, why not add Evil to the stack? Source: over 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: Does anyone Lisp without Emacs?
    2 stripe blue belt here! I used to use Vim for everything other than Java development and have now adopted Emacs in the same way. I am using it for Clojure and Common Lisp development along with org mode, irc, rss, git and file management I started with Evil mode and then moved to Xah fly keys before sticking to the emacs bindings. Having the caps lock key bound to CTRL helped me a lot. I don't know if it makes... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Emacs Is My New Window Manager
    If you already know Vim, you should probably not use Emacs without Evil: https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil It gives you comprehensive Vim bindings so what you need to learn to be comfortable in Emacs is very little. As a bonus, it also keeps your RSI risk unchanged. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
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Neovim mentions (108)

  • My Tech Stack in 2025
    PDE (Personalized Development Environment): Neovim. - Source: dev.to / 16 days ago
  • Optimizing My Dev Workflow in 2025
    I've used VSCode for years. It's great, no doubt. But when you have to juggle up to 5 projects daily, you'll find that it's going to block you away. Mine feels heavy, especially with multiple windows and extensions. This is why I decided to find an alternative, until I started using NeoVim instead. - Source: dev.to / 19 days ago
  • Setting Up Neovim for Automad Theme Development
    As the developer of the Automad flat-file content management system, I wanted to make working with Automad themes in Neovim as smooth as possible. Automad has its own templating syntax, so I created tree-sitter-automad to provide proper syntax highlighting. Since it’s not yet an official parser, you need to manually register it in Neovim. To speed up template writing, you can also add custom snippets using... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • How to turn NEOVIM into an IDE-like code editor in NIXOS?
    Welcome to my optimized Laravel development setup featuring Nvim with LazyVim integration. This configuration is tailored to enhance productivity and streamline the development workflow for Laravel projects. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Dear (Rust) Devs: Article Request
    You want to customize your Neovim config but you don't know Lua. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Evil and Neovim, you can also consider the following products

Doom Emacs - Emacs configuration similar to Spacemacs but faster and lighter.

VS Code - Build and debug modern web and cloud applications, by Microsoft

Org mode - Org: an Emacs Mode for Notes, Planning, and Authoring

Vim - Highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing

Spacemacs - Community-driven Emacs distribution that meshes Emacs and Vim features.

Sublime Text - Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, html and prose - any kind of text file. You'll love the slick user interface and extraordinary features. Fully customizable with macros, and syntax highlighting for most major languages.