Neonim gives a nice simple UI for running nvim.
This has led to it becoming more core to my development workflow, mostly replacing VSCode. However, that means I have a 4-5 Neonim instances open at a time. On macOS this gets especially annoying. So I started adding tabs using a "customTitleBar=` option I added to Siwin.
Each tab is a new instance of nvim and syncs to the current working dir of nvim.
Note: these aren't merged yet, but using FigDraw's color gradients made me happy!
I suck at choosing colors, but here's the gist:
The color and tint color can be set using env vars:
Because a text editor would be a whole different project in its own right.
Neovim buys a lot! Vim keybindings, plugins, buffers, window layouts, terminals, etc. It's highly extensible and Lua works much better as a scripting language than vimscript. It does all that while still being lighter and faster than VSCode and not tied to a megacorp's whims.
And you're right, Neonim isn't really a frontend, but more of a shell.
It simple provides a cross platform graphics shell for NVIM with a few niceties like better native copy-paste support and now tabs. Oh and mouse text selection only selects the current window, which was a big pet peeve in other nvim shells. It also happens to be very fast and low latency.
Going back to NVIM in iterm2 just feels slow. Neovide is also fast, but doesn't support system copy paste out of the box and has annoying animations.