If you have ever used Linux, you must have come across a number of very small text editors that are often used to edit the configuration files. Some of these editors include nano, vi and vim. Nano is particularly very useful when making changes to the GNU GRUB, a popular multiboot bootloader.
Now you can have the minimal user interface of nano and power of vim combined in one application called Neovim. It is a small text editor born from the code-base of the popular vim editor. Neovim is available for Windows, Linux and macOS.
After installing Neovim on your computer, you can simply run the nvim command to launch the Neovim editor. For the Windows computers, there are some other binaries also included but the official documentation suggests running it through the nvim command only.
If you have never used Neovim before, then it offers a 30 minute tutorial that can be used to learn how it works. For starting this tutorial, we can simple enter the :Tutor command. It will start a lesson that spans over multiple chapters. In each of these chapters, it is going to teach you something new. For example, you learn how to edit, how to delete, how to append and how to quit the editor.
If you want to customize Neovim, then you can type in the command :checkhealth. This will give analyze Neovim installation and show you a detailed report about which components are missing, which of the files are outdated and which components needs installation. For example, if you do not have Python installed, then it shows you error that it could not find Python 3 installed on your system.
The reason why some of the coders love using Neovim is because it now has in-built terminal emulator. So you can edit the source code in the top of the Neovim interface and then switch to the bottom of the interface to compile the code using the respective commands.
You can download Neovim from https://neovim.io/.