I tried NeoVim pretty early on, I think, around 2014. My primary editor at the time was gVim (I prefer a proper graphical front-end to running in a terminal).

I used nvim on and off, primarily with nvim-qt as the front-end, though briefly with a custom setup that launched a new terminal emulator window and ran nvim there.

Once nvim incorporated nvim-qt into the base install, I started using it more regularly; eventually I switched entirely to Neovide and haven’t even installed gVim on my last few work computers.

I now primarily use VSCode with nvim integration. Unfortunately, I do have a weird issue where “undo” combines more operations than I’d expect, or, in some rare cases, it seems to corrupt the buffer and produce states that didn’t previously exist (!!). I don’t know if that’s an issue with the plugin, though.

hassle-free copy/paste on wayland was my first reason to switch from vim to neovim. nvchad second

I don’t use it as much because my day-to-day is RStudio and Libre Office, but whenever I edit .nix files, I do it with Neovim. What convinced me was the internet’s lauding of Vim and reading about Lua and other quality of life improvements in Neovim. What convinced me was how easy it is to install and use for my minimal use case.

I don’t think I had an evaluation period beyond using interactive Vim tutorials until I felt comfortable with it.

Conjure is what did it for me. I kept running into trouble with Clojure vs ClojureScript vs Babashka projects with vim. Just couldn’t get the config to work consistently when switching between projects.

The eval period was about a day.

Long time vim user here. Practically had to choose right after starting as a dev, never looked back. All my editors/IDEs run in vim mode nowadays.

I don’t like the hassle of plugin management in vanilla vim.

I didn’t like evil spacemacs, but I do enjoy magit a lot.

Then tried neovim: good out-of-the-box experience, better plugin management, ready-to-use systems like nvchad. It’s been great.