
When writing large amounts of data to the tty it is common to first hide the cursor to avoid a flickering effect. This has been done in Nvim for a long time and was implemented in the function that actually flushed the TUI buffer out to the TTY. However, when using synchronized updates with the 'termsync' option this is no longer necessary, as the terminal emulator will buffer all of the updates and display them atomically. Thus there is no need to toggle the cursor visibility when flushing the buffer when synchronized updates are used. In fact, doing so can actually reintroduce cursor flickering in certain scenarios because the visibility state is itself being synchronized by the terminal. In addition, the management of the cursor visibility should not happen when the TUI _buffer_ is flushed, but rather when the TUI itself is flushed. This is a subtle but meaningful distinction: the former literally writes bytes to the TTY while the latter flushes the TUI's grid into its buffer. There is no need to hide the cursor every time we write bytes to the TTY, only at the beginning of a full TUI "flush" event.
Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to:
- Simplify maintenance and encourage contributions
- Split the work between multiple developers
- Enable advanced UIs without modifications to the core
- Maximize extensibility
See the Introduction wiki page and Roadmap for more information.
Features
- Modern GUIs
- API access from any language including C/C++, C#, Clojure, D, Elixir, Go, Haskell, Java/Kotlin, JavaScript/Node.js, Julia, Lisp, Lua, Perl, Python, Racket, Ruby, Rust
- Embedded, scriptable terminal emulator
- Asynchronous job control
- Shared data (shada) among multiple editor instances
- XDG base directories support
- Compatible with most Vim plugins, including Ruby and Python plugins
See :help nvim-features
for the full list, and :help news
for noteworthy changes in the latest version!
Install from package
Pre-built packages for Windows, macOS, and Linux are found on the Releases page.
Managed packages are in Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, Void Linux, Gentoo, and more!
Install from source
See the Building Neovim wiki page and supported platforms for details.
The build is CMake-based, but a Makefile is provided as a convenience. After installing the dependencies, run the following command.
make CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
sudo make install
To install to a non-default location:
make CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/full/path/
make install
CMake hints for inspecting the build:
cmake --build build --target help
lists all build targets.build/CMakeCache.txt
(orcmake -LAH build/
) contains the resolved values of all CMake variables.build/compile_commands.json
shows the full compiler invocations for each translation unit.
Transitioning from Vim
See :help nvim-from-vim
for instructions.
Project layout
├─ cmake/ CMake utils
├─ cmake.config/ CMake defines
├─ cmake.deps/ subproject to fetch and build dependencies (optional)
├─ runtime/ plugins and docs
├─ src/nvim/ application source code (see src/nvim/README.md)
│ ├─ api/ API subsystem
│ ├─ eval/ Vimscript subsystem
│ ├─ event/ event-loop subsystem
│ ├─ generators/ code generation (pre-compilation)
│ ├─ lib/ generic data structures
│ ├─ lua/ Lua subsystem
│ ├─ msgpack_rpc/ RPC subsystem
│ ├─ os/ low-level platform code
│ └─ tui/ built-in UI
└─ test/ tests (see test/README.md)
License
Neovim contributions since b17d96 are licensed under the
Apache 2.0 license, except for contributions copied from Vim (identified by the
vim-patch
token). See LICENSE for details.
Vim is Charityware. You can use and copy it as much as you like, but you are
encouraged to make a donation for needy children in Uganda. Please see the
kcc section of the vim docs or visit the ICCF web site, available at these URLs:
https://iccf-holland.org/
https://www.vim.org/iccf/
https://www.iccf.nl/
You can also sponsor the development of Vim. Vim sponsors can vote for
features. The money goes to Uganda anyway.