Neovim

Been using some sort of vi for 20-some years now and I'm still not convinced. I suspect it's got something to do with my configuration. I'll need to tinker a bit. I think I'll give it another 20 years then I'll let you know.

I had to SSH into a server for dev work at a previous job. And vim was the obvious best answer for "IDE like" experience in a terminal. I needed more power than nano.

And then vim stalled in development. Neovim was created in response to that, and it had new shiny features (many of which vim also has now), that caught my eye (async tasks were added to neovim before vim).

So I was a vim user out of necessity and I switched to neovim to chase new shiny things, and have found 0 reason to go back.

Ever since I learned about Vim it was something I wanted to learn but always feared the adjustment period and unwarranted words of caution from internet strangers.

I had learned i3 already and was focusing on keeping my hands on the keyboard for longer. I had a 2 week phase of watching the Primeagon and watching him use Neovim made me feel thoroughly embarrassed about how I wrote code. I already was sold on the logic, so seeing the benefits with my own eyes pushed me over the edge.

I got kickstarter working and after about 3 days of having vscode and neovim open next to each other, I found I was starting to move faster in neovim than vscode.

Now I have the confidence to open vi on a prod server and make changes. This new ability justified my desire to finally go for a programmable keyboard and now it's very rare I touch my mouse at all.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I installed LazyVim a few days ago and like it so far for smaller changes.

Anyways i can't use it for serious work due to missing features or i havent found them yet. I couldnt find out where to find plugins, how to install and configure them, its overwhelming.

I need full, in file, text search for the current directory, multi word editing, move lines up and down. Sure there are key combinations, but they all seems a bit long compared to VS Code.

Is there a slack for noobs like me or a Udemy course?

Switching from Vim was a no-brainer. I was on WSL 1, and the Alt/Meta key support was horrendous at the time. Neovim supported it perfectly.

Years later Neovim adopts Lua, I went back and forth between Emacs and Neovim for several months. Neovim stuck, because for some reason it just works. Lua is a little easier to learn and write (before I find the time to sit down and read the elisp manual properly, appreciating the lisp-ness), my Neovim setup had a satisfactory number of features whilst having minimum moving parts. It became easier to maintain. As my current daily driver I don't need to touch my config for months and it will work.

I also tried helix several weeks ago, it's great, but it doesn't support custom snippets and templates, among other things that were essential to the development for some of my projects.

I am not convinced Neovim is best for me, I miss Emacs from time to time. It's just what I've sticked with and I'm happy with it for now.

trying to use nano and getting confused out of my mind

vim isn't intuitive, but, for me, it feels correct

Used to use vimium for a while in the browser due some RSI complaints. Years later a colleague of mine was bashing me I didn't know how to use vim. Just to prove point I taught myself the basics, started using vim shortcuts in my IDE. Few months later I started using NvChad, which is amazing btw. After finding out about LSP support etc, I knew I could just switch completely.

Built my own config from scratch and been happily using neovim for about 2 years now.