Neovim is a rewrite of the vim project. From a high level (or from the perspective of a beginner to both), there's not much difference between the two. That is, basic usage will be the same regardless of which ones you choose. Like, the model philosophy and default key bindings are basically identical.

You start seeing major differences with more advanced usage and under the hood.

• Neovim is built to support async processing, while Vim is entirely synchronous

• Neovim offers native Language Server support while Vim requires plugins to do so. (Language Server Protocol is part of what makes VSCode so powerful)

• Vim plugins are written with a custom script called "vimscript" while Neovim plugins are written in Lua but also supports vimscript.

There are more differences, but this should cover the basic differences. I haven't used neovim in an age, so I'm up for any corrections if anyone has any