I recently switched.
Expect no noticeable speed difference.
Two reasons I switched:
Yes you should.
It's not hard to learn once you get over that first stage of not even knowing what a lua table is, and mentally accepts that arrays start at 1, not 0 :)
It should be noted that as long as you're on Neovim you can still keep your VimScript plugins and your VimScript config and gradually start using Lua plugins and Lua scripting. You don't need to do a complete rewrite over night.
There's no real downside to switching to Neovim. It's basically a superset of Vim, only with better defaults and more capabilities that you can opt-in to if you'd like (Treesitter, native LSP client, Lua, etc.).
Started out this way like a month ago and now am already modifying and writting simple plugins and I dont feel like any time was wasted... I think its the go to way if you are time constrained and still need to have modern vim plugin integration
Switched a few years back when I decided to mostly rewrite my config from scratch. It's definitely nice to use a normal programming language for your config, plus I've been doing a few things here and there that I never would have bothered with if I was still using vimscript. To top it off, I'm pretty sure you have to at least do some Lua work if you want to take advantage of the built in lsp support, which I make use of extensively.
It depends on what your expectations are and how you see your relationship to your editor (sorry for the cringe anthropomorphism)
If you want to tinker and think of tweaking your editor as a hobby, then sure dive in
If your config already works and you don't need the hassle, then don't
In between? Want to use a specific lua plugin but don't want to commit? You can do that too
Advantages
Disadvantages
In all seriousness, I recommend checking out preconfigured "distros" like LunarVim or NvChad. Here's my dotfiles.
Neovim is a modal text editor forked off of Vim in 2014. Being modal means that you do not simply type text on screen, but the behavior and functionality of the editor changes entirely depending on the mode.
The most common and most used mode, the "normal mode" for Neovim is to essentially turn your keyboard in to hotkeys with which you can navigate and manipulate text. Several modes exist, but two other most common ones are "insert mode" where you type in text directly as if it was a traditional text editor, and "visual mode" where you select text.
Neovim seeks to enable further community participation in its development and to make drastic changes without turning it in to something that is "not Vim". Neovim also seeks to enable embedding the editor within GUI applications.
The Neovim logo by Jason Long is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.