Neovim can be used as a drop-in replacement for Vim. Neovim is a fork of Vim, that branched out into its own thing in 2014. Neovim aims to address a few core issues about Vim:
- Working with a 30-year-old code base while maintaining backward compatibility is hard.
- It’s very difficult to write certain kinds of plugins, asynchronous operations being a huge culprit (asynchronous support has been added to Vim in version 8.0, some time after Neovim was forked).
- In fact, writing plugins is difficult overall, and requires the developer to be comfortable in Vimscript.
- Vim is difficult to use on modern systems without tinkering with .vimrc.
Neovim aims to solve these problems with the following methods:
- Large-scale refactoring of the Vim code base, including choosing a single style guide, increasing test coverage.
- Removing support for legacy systems.
- Shipping Neovim with modern defaults.
- Providing a rich API for plugins and external programs to talk to, including Python and Lua plugin support.
You can uninstall or removes an installed neovim package from Ubuntu through the terminal as shown below:
$ sudo apt-get remove neovim
Uninstall neovim including dependent package
If you would like to remove neovim and it’s dependent packages which are no longer needed from Ubuntu:
$ sudo apt-get remove --auto-remove neovim
When it comes to other packages, they are generally safe to remove with the apt autoremove command, since the majority of them will be packages that were installed as a dependency of another package that is no longer present on the system. However, double-check that you really do want to remove each of the packages before you do so. You can always reinstall a package if you didn’t mean to install it, and as an added benefit, if you reinstall a package that was marked for auto-removal, it won’t show up in the output as an orphan package in the future.
Use Purging neovim
If you’d like to not only remove a package but also wipe out its configuration, you can use the –purge option:
$ sudo apt-get purge neovim
If you use the purge option along with –auto-remove, everything regarding the package will be removed. It’s really useful when you want to reinstall it again.
$ sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove neovim