Install neovim with Homebrew, apk, chocolatey, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, scoop, winget, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• nvim

Project history

The `neovim/neovim` repository was created on 2014-01-31, and the project's wiki introduction existed by 2014-03-07. The README describes Neovim as an effort to aggressively refactor Vim in order to simplify maintenance, distribute work across contributors, enable advanced UIs without core changes, and maximize extensibility.

Neovim v0.1.0 was tagged on 2015-11-01. Later milestone lines made the fork feel less like a cleanup project and more like a modern editor platform: embedded terminal support, job control, MessagePack RPC, external UIs, Lua scripting and configuration, LSP, Tree-sitter, and a growing package/plugin ecosystem.

Adoption history

By 2026-07-01, GitHub metadata showed about 100,837 stars and 6,942 forks. Homebrew analytics listed 41,028 installs in 30 days, 137,631 in 90 days, and 513,070 in 365 days, far beyond the satellite GUI/helper packages in this batch.

Adoption is visible across package managers and operating systems: the README points to managed packages in Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Void, Gentoo, and more, while the input record also lists Chocolatey, Scoop, winget, MacPorts, Nix, apk, pacman, dnf, and zypper package names.

The ecosystem role changed over time. Early adopters cared about async jobs, remote plugins, terminal integration, and a cleaned-up codebase. Later adopters often arrive through Lua-first configuration, built-in LSP, Tree-sitter-driven editing, plugin managers, and distributions/configurations that use Neovim as a programmable editor platform.

How it is used

Users run `nvim` directly in terminals, set it as `$EDITOR`, embed it into GUIs or IDEs, run it headless for scripting, or configure it through `init.vim` and `init.lua` under the XDG config directory. The project keeps Vim's editing model and Vimscript compatibility while exposing newer Lua and API workflows.

Package nerds tend to care about Neovim's build and runtime boundaries: it is a standalone editor package, a shared dependency for GUI clients such as Neovide and Neovim Qt, and a target process for helpers such as `nvr`. Its package freshness matters because plugins and external clients often depend on relatively new API behavior.

Why package nerds care

Neovim is one of the clearest examples of a Unix-y tool becoming a platform through stable APIs instead of a single monolithic GUI. In package databases, it should be enriched not just as an editor, but as an ecosystem root for Lua plugins, LSP workflows, external UIs, headless automation, and Vim-compatible terminal editing.

Timeline

• {'date': '2014-01-31', 'event': 'The `neovim/neovim` GitHub repository was created.'}
• {'date': '2014-03-07', 'event': 'The Neovim wiki Introduction page was created.'}
• {'date': '2015-11-01', 'event': 'Neovim v0.1.0 was tagged.'}
• {'date': '2021-07-02', 'event': 'Neovim v0.5.0 was tagged, a major milestone for Lua-era configuration and plugin development.'}
• {'date': '2024-05-16', 'event': 'Neovim v0.10.0 was tagged.'}
• {'date': '2026-06-10', 'event': 'Neovim v0.12.3 was published as the stable release line represented in Homebrew on 2026-07-01.'}

Related projects

• Vim
• Neovide
• Neovim Qt
• neovim-remote
• vscode-neovim
• Firenvim
• Tree-sitter
• LuaJIT
• libuv

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/neovim/neovim
• https://api.github.com/repos/neovim/neovim/releases?per_page=100
• https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula/neovim.json
• https://github.com/neovim/neovim
• https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Introduction/_history
• https://neovim.io/
• https://neovim.io/doc/user/lua.html
• https://neovim.io/doc/user/news.html