Why I Left Nvim | Prime Reacts
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- čas přidán 4. 07. 2023
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Great article!
If I could provide a critique/comment on your experience, I would like to say that this is why you don't go down the customisation rabbit hole. I learned basic vim keybindings, and still use that. I have only two extensions (fzf + live server) and 4 configs (hlsearch, incsearch, number, relativenumber). Whenever I ssh anywhere, I know I can quickly get running, which I cannot do with code. If you want customisation, use an already configured keybinding and extension setup by any of the great people and setup dotfile config so it is automatically installed in whatever system you ssh to. In vscode, I was slow. In vim, I was slower. For 1 month. Now I'm atleast 2 times faster. No dragging the mouse to select something. No dragging the mouse to file tree to navigate and open a file. No opening folder, browsing through my files and selecting my project. Just open a new session on tmux and run vi, all good. Just pure code editing.
You actually gave me a very good idea and a potential solution to my problem. Cause the thing I found tiring about Neovim is exactly that: tinkering everyday and spending hours trying to learn all its details and the perfect set of plugins and keybinds that I end up not doing any development, but instead just customising my editor endlessly.
The solution is as you mentioned: be satisfied with a "good enough" setup and THEN revisit it 6 months later to deal with its pain points and deficiencies. Do that every 6 months and dedicate a day for example to re-optimise the refactor my config. That's a great idea, with all honesty.
Or just use a preconfig
I had the exact same problem. Plus I never understood viml. My brain never parsed that language. Then I switched to emacs and it was even worse, but at least my braid could parse elisp. Then doom-emacs and it finally feels like I let somebody else care about the details. My config accumulated over the years of experience got replaced quickly.
@@pixelsam123 I thought about it but it just doesn't work for me for the same reasons in that article. For instance, I don't like the default keybinds set in most of those distros, I don't like the fact that there are things installed that I don't need nor want to use, I don't like the fact that someone made those choices for me where the whole idea of using Neovim is to be customisable and personal. For example, I like the interface of lazy more than packer so I don't like using a distro that is built on packer. Same goes for many little choices here and there.
It’s still a lot of work but well worth imo, start with a preconfig or build from scratch but spend some time with it. Decide what needs to change and batch it. As time goes on it can be less frequent but you may have to do this every other day, then weekly etc as you delve in. This is true for engaging with any system which has a dynamic nature, it can be very chaotic when it’s not imposing any rigid structure, you need order to develop trust and reliability.
Yeah, this is the answer. If I run into a problem with my config at work now, I note it down on a piece of paper and keep working. I revisit the paper every few weeks to clean up the pain points in my config
I needed so much to listen to this. This last weekend I spent all the time trying to improve my nvim config. And couldn't solve almost anything. Felt so frustrating, but it exactly it. Let's keep with the good enough. Thanks man!
I am 100% a victim of trying to tinker things to perfection, the whole reason I went with Notion over Obsidian is because of how much more room I had to configure pages/etc
I don't use notion because of the stupid shitty always cloud connectivity.
VimWiki > Notion > Obsidian
I moved to Logseq purely because the defaults are good enough that I don't find myself tinkering obsessively
@@QmVuamFtaW4 org-mode with org-roam
@@kublaikhan437 me too other than that I love there is git plugin support, so I could push the notes into private repo and then sync it with other device
I finally left NVim as well... by figuring out how to use Shift + ZZ. Bwazingwy fwast ❤
bro just gave a cheatsheet for beginners
I always forget ZZ lol, my muscle always type :x
How about remapping it and replacing shift with (space) leader :)
Also, why wouldn’t we open a split terminal view for each of these executions instead? It might eliminate sleeping and being blocked from dev while executing without having a separate session
ZQ if you don’t care to save the buffer
@@liggodoggo998bro i’m still muscled to :wq
11:14 the overview on the right is useful when dealing with existing legacy projects and some files are thousands of lines. It supports highlighting lines for a few different things (search, diff, errors, breakpoints) to get a quick way to jump to those lines visually. Yes, you can do the same sort of jump using keybinds or other keyboard-only interactions, but I've still found it convenient when editing monolithic typedef files on someone else's typescript project (or massive generated files when using a generator to quickly get up and going with graphql in a typescript project) or massive c files I need to update from an abandoned project I still rely on tools from.
As an indecisive beginner who's still all over the place and trying to find a path, this channel speaks to me a lot. I see it pop in the suggestions almost everytime I search a question and it's mostly here I find the answers I need.
Thanks a lot!
I've been trying to switch to Neovim for years. And I really tried, many times. But I always switched back to VSCode, because I just don't have time to learn. It always got in the way of me actually coding.
You talk about the value of "Good Enough", for me VSCode is "Good Enough".
If VSCode works for you, don't let anyone tell you that it's not good enough. Whatever works, works.
as long you enjoy it and it make you more productive, then VSCode is the best for you, dont look for another
And there's also one other really annoying thing: I am an azerty user. And you can really feel that vim/tmux were made by qwerty users...
I know you can remap everything, but I don't have time for that either.
@@chtcoder6439 If you like your current workflow, there's 0 reason to change it. However, I do remember my first neovim experiences being the exact as yours. It took me like 2 years and atleast 4 attempts to switch to neovim before I finally took a few days to actually properly learn some of the basic keybinds etc. For me, it was definitely worth it since it saves me so much time every day now, but yeah it was definitely not something you learn in a couple of minutes haha.
I switch to ubuntu like 10 times before i can not go back to winfows
I'm glad you went over this since the stream recording didn't work, very good conversation
I really love this video and very much needed someone to tell me this, thank you soo much!!!
I made the switch to Neovim earlier this year, all thanks to Primeagen. On my first night, I ended up playing around with configurations until 4am. I thought I had everything figured out, but little did I know that it was just the beginning of a never-ending journey of configuring Neovim.
I spent weeks experimenting with different things, but eventually found my sweet spot with LazyVim. Once I got used to working within this configuration, things started falling into place.
I totally get what TJ and Prime mean about personalizing your experience. With Neovim, it's all about constantly iterating and fine-tuning your configuration. It took me around 3-4 months to really nail down my setup using LazyVim. But now, I feel like a pro with Neovim, and it's customized perfectly for my needs.
I even went the extra mile and created my own custom SolarizedDark theme, along with a few others that I couldn't find in VSCode.
To sum it up, Neovim does require some time and effort to get it up and running smoothly. But once you do, the satisfaction is worth it. You become intimately familiar with your PDE and can troubleshoot any issue at a moment's notice. At this moment I rarely play my configuration and only focus on code.
Since we both use the same nvim distribution and you have experience working with themes, I was wondering if you could help me with a configuration issue. Specifically, I've been struggling to permanently set the guibg (background color) of my relative column line. Despite trying to create an autocmd for it, it keeps getting overridden by lazyvim. Currently, I have to manually type the command each time I launch nvim. Do you have any suggestions or solutions to ensure the guibg setting persists upon launching nvim?
Imagine if you had just spent your time learning how to make some proper code...
@@FainTMakodefine ‘proper code’. Setting up nvim also requires writing code.
@@WouterStudioHD look at what you just said, you had to write code before you could start writing code??
@@WouterStudioHD proper code as in something that solves a problem for a business. It should bring value to people. Making ur ide feel good is not coding lol
I would say that learning other people's setups is actually great as long as you learn *lots* of them. It allows you to take parts you like from all of them and synthesise them to get something perfect for you
Baseline Neovim = fantastic example of minimalism
As soon as Lazy was installed, every little action felt a bit off. Still pretty fast, but not AS fast. After much investigation, it turns out that there are many plugins installed and turned on by default with that feeling you described at 13:28.
Went back to packer and dein without all the fancy plugins and I felt unchained like I got out of the gravity chamber after a 10 year stay. 🚄
I don't do lazy.nvim because I want it to be a little bit painful to install a new plugin. Then I have to ask if it's worth it
I use AstroNvim, because I to lazy to configure Lazy ...
I just found out packer and lazy exist. What's wrong with vim-plug?
@@coconutflour9868I would say nothing if it works for you.
Lazy is weird with all its lazy loading. Every feature on every startup takes WAY to long to load. I'm a slug and use a preconfigured nvim because I wanted to try it out and got stuck. But Packer really seems like it has the advantage in speed.
@@coconutflour9868 I liked vim-plug. I switched to packer because it seemed easier when I went to a full Lua config
Interesting reflections, mostly watching this to understand how other developers think about their editor choice. For myself I have a vimrc that is old enough to drink and I'm at a point where I make maybe a handful of changes to it a year, if that. Used to tinker with it constantly in my early years, but at some point you grow into a workflow where you're so comfortable with what you're doing that there's not much that is bothering you enough to change things around. I guess one could probably argue this might just as likely be an indication of things getting stale though. Watching your videoes is helpful in that regard to challenge what I'm ingrained with, so cheers for that. Keep'em coming.
Great video, definitely prefer this style over a twitch live version.
Another part of it is being able to share ide tooling across a team. You can create shared vscode files that have debugging, settings, snippets, and recommended plugins that just work out of the box.
Feel that. I wanted to become a Arch-Vim Person and ended up as Fedora-VS-Code+NvimBindings Person
Bro, that's LITERALLY me, wtf 💀
😭 ho my goooood, you explained me
debian based ->arch based -> arch -> fedora and never moved away
Regarding the distro argument, I was getting tired of constantly finding things were missing or broken with my own config, and it is really annoying. I eventually tried out LunarVim and it's pretty intuitive out the box. Sure, I could fine tune a few things but to be honest, once you get to a point where you have the muscle memory for all the tools you need to be productive, that "becomes" my preference. Plus the way the config files are written make it really easy to include something like Harpoon into the mix and even give it all the first class treatment, like showing up in the quick menu etc..
I used to be a big config tuner. Could sink a lot of time trying to get some stupid 'convinience' feature to work. You're spot on about good enough and self control. I don't tinker with the config much except to occasionally add a new key binding, and then every once in a while maybe something larger. If things are working, I don't feel like i need to make it better anymore.
Nvim has been super fun and fast to use so far. I have configured it to fit me and its golden. I came from a really nice setup and fit with VSCode and i have been able to get most of the functionality i am used to with Tmux, lspzero, Treesitter, and a few other little things like comments, snippets, etc. It feels great not having to leave the terminal at all too. Teaches a few things while setting up and once i got that I'm content. I love it because it made me realize i would be able to pull my config easily on whatever setup i create in the future. Not against VSCode at all but using Nvim in the terminal is just faster for me to STARTUP and get going these days.
If you are a coder you should not rice your dev host. Completely agree with that. I used to build my own desktop environment from scratch and learned really quickly that's not fun when you're trying to do get work done. Stay as close to default as possible to make updates smooth as possible.
agreed
@@ThePrimeTimeagen yeah agree, but still you are vimfluance people and laugh at one that use vscode. You just changed your mind when Theo did video about being default as possible...
@@js-ny2ru vscode isn't the default though. It's just a software you can install.
I “rice” it in the more inobstrusive ways. I swapped out Gnome for KDE, I installed some new global theme, I swapped out window manager level shortcuts for caps lock as escape. Other than that, the customisation stays in my shell scripts I write and my window manager specific workflow (I like Yakuake w/ tmux)
Depends what you mean by rice, if ricing includes making your environment more productive then no you should, otherwise get stuck with using your mouse on a subpar OS and subpar floating wms
Nice. I even forgot you weren't streaming, until the reminder at the end.
I was a VIM (and earlier VI) user for decades, coming out of college having learned it on HP/UX systems. And for a long time I used it even when I went to Microsoft where I'd get weird looks from the GUI users. But eventually I capitulated, because all of the development effort was going towards those other systems, and they got to the "good enough" state where I no longer perceived a real benefit from my old experience. In the end, the amount of time I spend physically writing code is dwarfed by the amount of time I spend reasoning about the problem I am trying to solve, so tools that help me reason better or communicate better are so much more worth my time to learn to use effectively (and we only have so much time in the day). Others who get to spend more time "in the trenches" may not make this tradeoff, but that's what led be to VSCode and away from the VIM variants.
This comment needs to be pinned! Thank you for sharing your experience
Yeah. I agree. In the end what matters that you get work done. VSCode is just that. That’s why vi or nano is amazing because it just does the job without needing to configure it. And it s available everywhere.
What do you mean about the communication?
Or some people might not have to do this tradeoff and are using the best stool for the best job for every task, it has nothing to do with the "trenches", if your execution is slow and doesn't follow your mind's speed then you're just limiting yourself no matter what and are getting distracted by a subpar tool.
I'd also add that your example is pure nonsense neo(vim) isn't just for when you "physically write code", this part is solved by every decent vim emulation in other editors, "thinking about a problem" requires switching between different files in different projects, grepping, finding, fuzzy finding, putting things to the quick fix list and so on, all that is done way faster in neovim, editors like vscode don't even have decent fuzzy finders for that matter.
Unless what you mean by "thinking" is going to the woods and think about your project but at that point you don't even need a computer.
I love using vim but for bigger projects I really like having my files in tabs on the top and having easy access to the file explorer. These visuals really help me as I don't have to keep this information in my memory.
You can have that in neovim? 🤔
@@AlfWyeah but you also probably have to find the right plugins etc as well, ie more things to learn and know
Use bufferlines for tabs and nvim tree for file explorer. I personally use the oil plugin.
@@chrisdistant9040It literally takes less time to google and install bufferline and nerdtree/neotree or whatever than watching this video
I was thinking about giving neovim a try, this has me questioning that decision again.
For context, I only program maybe 30-50% of my time. Most of it is in completely different applications like Altium, yED or Innovus. So any benefits from being faster in an editor are rather small. Plus I kinda don‘t want to learn yet another set of shortcuts, I already confuse them quite often.
The Vim bindings are worth learning for basic text editing. That's why it's a popular editor in the first place -- and for some people, their only editor.
I've used vim for web server config in linux. Now I'm using Vim extension in Visual Studio for C# and intend to add it to my VSCode setup on Linux. This way you get used to the navigation and the main thing is to be able to move through a file by words.
Sure getting faster at something you do 50% of your time isn't worth, bro seriously
hi! you dont have to use neovim for the configs. most ides support vim motions, so youll be fine. you should try it though, i cant go back to anything ive tried before. it does take some time to configure/get used to, but typecraft, tj and prime have good resources regarding that part
loved the video format, do more pls
I moved away from vim (back around 2008, so it's been a while and also way before neovim) after using it for about a year because there always was like a barrier between me and the code. I couldn't just write code, I had to first think about getting to insert mode, leaving insert mode to move somewhere else, thinking about how to navigate there, entering insert mode again, etc.
In the end, I wanted to write code, not having to think about the mode my editor is in and how many lines, characters, or words my insert destination is away from the text cursor.
I've also tried using Harpoon on vscode, but the tab bar is just better for me, because I don't have the memory to remember which file is which number. With the tab bar I can see it on screen, and just ctrl+page up/down navigates me to that file. With ctrl+shift+page up/down I can rearrange the tabs in the way that the files I'm working on right now are next to each other.
when I'm new to a project, I need the file tree, even if it follows a "standard" directory structure because In every project I have been, they have standard file structure and a lot more than that, so I spend a few hours, reading through the code, jumping from definition to definition, memorizing the directory structure, making additional key bindings I consider will be helpful and keep optimizing on that as I go.
I use neovim daily, but I have GoLand and VSCode installed as well. For VSCode the neovim extension (which embeds your neovim directly into vscode) is pretty good.
This is the exact video that might actually get me to drop VSCode and pick up vim. Once I figure out these plugins, I like how the telescope example works, but I have no idea how to get anywhere from the Tilde wall, but I just put neovim on my machine so I guess we will see.
The last thing I updated on my neovim config was removing a plugin I didn't use that I forgot I had installed, that was last month, before then it was probably 8 months since I migrated from standard vim to neovim for better LSP support and ez autoconfiguration of LSP. That, treesitter and the better performance from lua made me switch. The core vim/nvim config remains mostly the same as before, near default.
I really like the point about only revisiting your config every 6 months or so. I've also found it useful to be a bit strict on which plugins to pull in.
For example, I'll only pull in a plugin for something that's becoming a major pain point. I'll also do some research on which plugin best fits the issue and consider alternatives.
In the end, I find myself naturally touching my config less. It also helps prevent your config from bloating out of control with useless shit 😁
A couple of months ago I configured my Neovim completely to match my workspace in VSCode and it worked pretty good but some configs I wasn't able to setup correctly, such as Tailwind and a few other things I use. In the end I switched back to VSCode although I use Neovim for Rust programming sometimes. But generally speaking, I agree with some of the author's opinions and also agree with Prime and I can even say that I'm really looking forward to the development of Zed, it seems to be a really powerful >blazingly fast lol< code editor :)
The first thing I did when I tried out co-pilot was set up a keybinding to turn it off. It makes WILD predictions that end up being more distracting than helpful. I wanted to be able to turn it on and off quickly so that I only get help when I ask for it. I ended up leaving it off and forgetting that I was paying for it for over a month.
It's a nice tool, but like you said it's only really GREAT at boiler plate. In my experience the time it saves by generating correct code is lost by the time you have to spend going through and fixing it when it's wrong.
Side note... I'm a long time VS Code with Vim keybindings user. I'm tempted to make the change NeoVim, but I haven't made the plunge. What's a good way to try it out and see if it's for me without going through a lengthy setup process?
would love to see a video on you reconfiguring your nvim config what changes you are going to make and why.
primeagen, disculpa que lo redacte en español. Me gusto mucho lo que mencionaste de buscar la eficiencia y segui, usando lo que mas comodo te parezca, personalmente me paso lo mismo de nexxeln y es que cuando neovim salto a lua no fui capaz de adaptarme pues ya tenia todo mi entorno en vimscript, ya me habia acostumbrado y no tenia tiempo para aprender lua y empezar a configurar todo otra vez. tambien se me hizo mas complejo algunas configuraciones, algo tan simple como hacer un remap y tenia aun mas pasos y me desmotivo bastante. Voy a volver a darla la oportunidad mas adelante.
After hearing you talk about just using vanilla tools, i have pretty much taken that approach and honestly, I like it way better.
Getting bogged down making it look pretty distracts me hardcore.
Now i just change a few keybinds to keep consistency and im off to the races.
I'm curious, how can you search files / directories with a fuzzy finder? Like you did at 8:10 . I think I just waste so much time using "cd" to move around and get to my project to start coding.
Also great video!
It looks like fzf to me.
@@notusingmyrealnamegoogle6232 Thanks for the reply, I'm searching how to use fzf. And looking it up it really does look like fzf.
i've tried using primes i3 and nvim setup. it's defo fun but i just wasn't up for re-fixing it every few months, reinstalling on new laptops and actually building the muscle memory
however i'm happy i'm knowing it all exists if it ever tempts me again.
It defo handy knowing vim. Using it as my daily driver, just has a lot of overheads as a frontend guy IMO.
just can't really beat installing in one place, click a few UI buttons for vscode extensions, and you're done.
In addition to helping junior or other devs do the same on my team. It's easier for me to lead by example. The idea of flexing some NVIM on them is appealing but i'd rather just be better at helping them out.
So I do understand Prime's "function only" mentality. It certainly makes good logical sense and I think sometimes I wish that were me. But I don't rice my system just to rice it. I am extremely influenced by environment, aesthetics, cleanliness, and quality. Even my physical environment like my office, desk, shelves, lighting, monitors, etc. is important to me. I have to create an environment that I WANT to work in. And for me, bare walls, white lights, plain desk, stock keyboard, yada yada don't make me want to work in that environment. Now it's not like I CAN'T, but I work so much faster and with more enthusiasm when I'm in an aesthetically pleasing office space. Maybe it's feng shui, maybe it's OCD, maybe it's a disorder for all I know lol. But my computer is no different. I had been on Ubuntu since high school which was almost 15 years ago now. I ended up making the switch to Arch somewhere around 2017, and let me tell you, I don't think I left my room for 6 months.
From the very start, and following the wiki (which is hands down the greatest OS wiki on Earth), I began installing everything from the command line. I learned so much about how my system even works, what components actually make up an OS, and how to basically build my own environment from the ground up. Nothing that went on my system wasn't directly put there by me. All of this made me want to customize every last detail and end up building a system that was uniquely mine, highly functional, and beautiful to look at. I hate bloat as much as the next guy, but that doesn't mean at all that you can't have a sleek experience. The beauty of software like Neovim and Linux is that you can create a beautiful looking experience and still avoid a lot of the bloat and fat that comes with Windows, Mac, VS Code, and prefab packages, and that's because YOU put it there. You can use your system with only the components you want, and avoid others. And my system is super fast. There is really nothing I use that I'm like "I wish this were faster."
It's all about preference, and I completely understand the desire for minimalist functional environments with ZERO fat, but it's certainly not necessary to be a fast, efficient, and effective coder that knows your system inside and out and maintains a workflow that makes you excited to use and yes, even look at, to make the best out of your job. When you're losing performance to the point where it's slowing you down, or you perform repetitive tasks inefficiently because you can't do it any other way, then yes, fry off some of that rice and go get your life right with Christ.
When I started on VSCode and modified it as much as I could. I was a heavy VSCode user, I knew all the shortcuts and I was really fast with it. When I had an old Mac that couldn't run VSCode I tried NeoVim, since I was already using the Vim VSCode plugin. I loved it. I was so glad I could modify it specifically to my personal needs, I still like the file explorer btw. In the beginning I was modifying my config like every other day. The thing I have observed is as time goes on I need to modify it less and less often. Right now I might touch my config once a month if I want to try a new plugin. My config still has some minor bugs but again the are not that problematic and I'll try to solve them once a month. I am using AstroNvim because I wanted an quick start but I have been modifying its plugins anyways. Apart from some tsserver stuff, that I probably haven't setup yet, I haven't seen any difference in my coding to VSCode, Copilot runs smoothly as well. I love to try new plugins but I am quick to dispose of them if I don't like them or I don't need them. Also, Updating my packages is fine. I update them regularly and the interesting thing about lazy.nvim is it will tell me if there are some breaking changes and I can take a look at them, so no problem there.
Really liked the article as well! Some valid points where made and I do thing you should use what ever editor you feel comfortable with, just learn the damm editor really well!
I love your videos! I am still a Vim user, btw. I haven't touched my config in 3 months. And that was because I was trying to get Vim to be my primary SQL editor. I would like to use dadbod, but I still can't find a descent tutorial or how to get auto completion for tables and columns. Any help on where to look is much appreciated.
Are you doing any live events in the mear future? I’m visiting SF for a few weeks and would love any tips for tech events to attend.
Nothing right now, but I am looking
As someone who has never used copilot I actually never really feel the need for it. Sure, I may have encountered some difficulties trying to solve some shit out myself but I just treat is part of the learning process and I almost always manage to figure it out by looking it up.
Also, I get the part where the neverending push to rice burns you out lol. Been there done that specially when I got really into ricing my window manager a while back, it's like an addiction. Whenever you see someone have that oh so good looking setup, you just feel the need to go back and improve on yours even though it already was working fine. I always ended up asking myself, man, are these sweet ass colors really making any difference on the way I write code or am I just wasting my time doing this in order to get a few thumbs up on reddit back then.
I think copilot is a hindrance if you're learning how to code, but it's a godsend when you need to write semi repetitive things, or you're working with an unfamiliar library trying to do *one* thing and don't feel like scouring the docs for how to get some type so you can do the thing
Copilot as an auto complete sucks but copilot chat is worth 10 dollars for sure. It’s worth it especially in vscode, but u can still use it in vim and it’s hella useful
I have a similar state with Emacs.
I got into a rice loop, although I had no actual project. The moment I had to start doing some coding, Emacs gave me just that bit more friction that I returned to VS Code LSP works flawlessly, and I can edit just as fast if not faster. And since then I've also been deepening my shortcut knowledge.
However, I do not regret customizing my Emacs, It's not perfect the LSP and autocomplete may need some work but since I don't use it for big stuff I don't care, like OP I still use Emacs to take notes and stuff like that it's just fun to spam commands, although I'm not actually doing nothing, cuz happy keyboard noises.
And I agree that it is an experience that everyone should do.
Heck I would argue a similar thing with using a bare git repo for dotfiles. I can replicate my setup with relative speed, sure that have been some complications mainly due to the fact that one of my environments is Arch Linux and the other is WSL (ArchWSL, so kinda arch still, I actually like arch it's not the BTW meme here, the recency of the packets I like, and I've only had it break on the grub issue which was now replaced by systemd-boot and when I was too sleepy to wait for the update to finish and the poor machine hanged and so I had to chroot into it after mounting the btrfs subvols, so I could mkinipcio -P since that's what I broke, I actually wrote a script to build that environment from scratch although I still had no reason to test it, ok I did the BTW didn't I...) so as I'm doing a native Linux and WSL some configurations differ and to add to the complication the bare metal is Wayland and WSL has GWSL which is X11 based so I already had issues with pulse audio variables (metal uses pipewire) and $DISPLAY, so yea it has been a ride, but even so I like it since I can configure something on one side and just dot commit; dot push and on the other machine dot pull and done.
TL;DR Tinkering is good and I think necessary, but when you need to do a job just use tools that work.
The FOMO on fancy new plugins is soo real! To be fair to Neovim, I have the same issue with every pluggable editor I've used. Don't know a great solution there except developing discipline (not gonna happen).
Vim keybindings are DEFINITELY a godsend. It's like if you had copy and pasted by writing things BY HAND and someone suddenly told you about CTRL-C/V. It's a higher level of abstraction and composable, so you spend less time telling the computer HOW to do the thing, and more what to do.
If you need more than 10 plugins for your editor it is the wrong tool for you. Keep the number of plugins under 10.
@@banatibor83 That's an arbitrary number, ain't it? I get your point, it's that it's funny when people set a number, threshold that isn't really based on reality.
For someone else having more than 3 plugins is stupid. For others, plugins are their way to tailoring their Neovim setup. I think the right criteria would be how much it affects the performance of the editor, and more importantly your performance. The latter is harder to quantify though. It's almost always better to just focus on mastering the tools you currently have, and stop worrying the better ways your can write code, and just write the damn code. But this problem is present there as well. When should you be satisfied with the code you write?
Ugh, this is hard. Who thought that defining what is "enough" would be this deep of a problem.
I believe I heard you say (in one of your videos) that you use Linux as your OS for development work. Which laptop do you use?
I started to use Neovim this year and it has been an amazing experience. The only tools that I didn't like to use in Neovim are debug adapters and Jupyter Notebooks. I think that the debug adapters its on me to learn and set up in the way I prefer to use, but the Jupyter Notebooks I couldn't find a good alternative.
I have a lot of fun setting my setup whenever I find something that I want or something that have broken, so I don't see time expended as a drawback 😂
Interesting, I was searching for Jupiter notebooks a while ago, but I stopped caring about it and just use vim slime. For data science task is enough for me.
Yes, i hated debug adaptor and coundn' get it work for 1 year ,
but my approch was wrong, i just should have used mason properly and everything would have configured automatically
The problem with packanges and config changes Helix is solving very well. Build in Treesitter and LSP
I like what helix is doing, but I really wish it would have vim bindings, becasue everything uses vim bindings
@@gorudonuF that. I like Object-Verb wayyy better. Helix and Kakoune got bindings right.
11:48 - What? I've been using my Macbook air m1 for web development since it was released and its still a beast. What do you mean 'eventually'
I too agree that one has to stop configuring when it is good enough.
I use vanilla emacs and I spend too much time making its function and appearance perfect. Then one day when I was setting up a cloud environment I realised that my setup is reproducible with a small subset of my init file.
That being said that is probably only possible in hindsight. As one do need a significant amount of time to experiment with different options to come up with a trimmed down setup that they need.
So If I am to start from scratch again, I will probably start with some distribution then gradually disable the functionalities until I am left with the only stuff that I need.
I have a similar problem. I can't kill the thread that constantly runs in the back of my mind that's demanding that I keep configuring and updating plugins while also living in fear that something is always on the verge of breaking.. It's a hell of a thing.
I had the problem with lag in neovim for a long time but what I found out is that when using "nvim-cmp" you can decrease the "performance.fetch_timeout" setting (it is set to 500ms by default). It specifies how long cmp should wait before sorting and displaying the results to the user. During this time it also blocks the input and a input lag of 500ms is noticable.
I went through the same process but decided to switch to Helix, it's written in rust, it's blazingly fast, super responsive, it's very minimalistic, lean, and effective you get the bare minimum of usefulness and no bloat. Out of the box you get full modal support like vim / nvim ( but based on kakoune motion ( which I personally prefer tho if you are switching from vim and want only vim bindings there's already a repo with pre-made config for that ) The configuration of the editor is so much better than neovim, there's no Lua file just a config.toml file which is very well documented and easy to use. You get the ability to split windows, a file gutter, fuzzy finder, lsp, themes ( you can add your own too it's very simple compare to vim, just create a theme directory in your .config/helix/themes and put the file ) it support transparency, debugging, through DAP, buffer, clipboard support, different registers for copy pasting, It's imo a superior neovim, I really liked neovim, but it's so unintuitive to configure, the documentation is inconsistent at best, and I'm probably not that good at lua. I get that you can configure it the way you want, but helix just work, it has everything I want, and it consistently work, with just a brew install helix, I get my nice editor, I symlink my config and hop I'm ready to work in no time.
Hmmm watched the video on their site, and it just looks like my NVim setup with Telescope. Not sure the point of making an editor from scratch when an NVim distro would essentially provide the same thing, but far more extendable.
@@brandongregori995 Yes, and no I've tried, many distros, like NvChad, LunarVim, AstroVim, SpaceVim. They are all very good implementation, and yes you are right, with them you get a lot out of the box, and you get the opportunity to customise it further. The thing is, they all require a bunch of dependencies, that may break in the future, with an update, it happened a few times and it's quite frustrating. I don't expect it to be perfect, because at the end of the day I know the maintainers are doing it for free, but Helix so fas has always been simple and reliable, and to me it's what I'm looking for, I don't need much for what I code, so I don't mind having less features, as long as the one integrated are well made, and coherent. Because with nvim, plugins, a lot of the times you get some conflict, and things that stop working, and it's quite annoying to go dig in to fix, at least it's my experience, some people might have another experience and it's totally fine.
MaDe WiTh RuSt… BlAzInGlY fAsT
@@internetsfinest8839 I had to for the meme, but it is fast.
Hey, not a big deal, but just thought I should point out you don't actually have any link to the blog post on your description (I ended up manually copying it from the URL in the video, but still, would be nice to have the source directly on description).
I agree with every point made here, especially the tinkering part - I had to uninstall the custom theme I made because I was obsessing over trying to get it perfect. I don't even want to know how many hours I wasted.
I, even as a pure spare time code, definitely like Vim motions. But if I code with (N)Vim a longer time, I have issues during my daily business work. I often want to change the mode or try to apply the Vim motions in Word, Excel and OneNote unconsciously. It really takes some hours to get used to it. Or am I just too old?
I switched from neovim to IntelliJ IDEA with ideavim plugin which gives 90% of the vim shortcuts on it.
A modern IDE combined with vim keybindings is the way to go.
vscode also has vscodevim which is pretty nice too.
vim isn't just the editor, it's a way of life.. you can utilize it anywhere.
that's what I do too, intelliJ + ideavim, so I don't have to configure vim nor intellij, it's the best of both world with the minimal amount of work
Yeah, can't imagine browsing without vimium and bunch of shortcuts
meanwhile I use Emacs with evil mode lmao
I suggest using the Neovim plugin for VSCode instead of the more popular and well known vim one. It's faster and has fewer issues and bugs, and it uses Neovim as the backend instead of trying to "re-implement" it in JS.
I started with JetBrains IDEs then installed ideavim and now use exclusively neovim.
It's really satisfying to go minimal with the right tools.
I agree with many points of ThePrimagean. Although, I don't tend to use the default but seek out people who have configured programs in a nice way (such as his neovim config) an either take their whole config or steal bits and pieces. Keeping up with all updates and trying to configure everything all the time just is very boring to me. Having a phase like that is useful for learning how things work, but don't get stuck in it. My method of course has downsides as well but it feels like an overall productive and frictionless approach to me.
I have questions, how you guys get to know about the vim and learn about how to use them? How much time you devote to configuring and practicing using this kind of editors? Even though this will speed up coding, sometime I just feel confused about these complex configs.
I stopped using neovim because I wasn't able to code as much due to plugins breaking my config. Tbh I never considered just not updating lol. Might have to try it again
Is there a way for a plugin manager to force to a specific commit/version of a plugin? I would want one config across several computers to have the same experience
I love this post-stream article content, as you deliver focused thoughts that you had time to think through on stream. Give it to me, but dont give it to me raw?!
Personally, I've found copilot to be very useful for repetitive tasks, and now I have the copilot chat extension in VSCode so it's convenient for me to ask stuff like Regex or date time formatting. I can give it the response object from an API and ask it to give me a TS interface for it. It definitely has saved me a lot of time when doing things that are time consuming but easy.
I started programming in Java and C# so I've used Visual Studio (later Visual Studio + Resharper) and IntelliJ before going for Rider and IntelliJ. These big IDEs get extremely resource hungry for large projects where just indexing files upon startup can take 10+ minutes. One thing I learnt though is that they're not just spinning in idle while doing this. Jetbrains editors are extremely powerful. They'll have refactoring features and project wide symbol searching that'll blow anything else out of the water. When I tried to setup neovim there was just no getting around the fact that I would have to sacrifice a lot of editor features if I wanted faster load performance (and as it turns out not even that much faster because scanning large projects will take a long time no matter what editor you use). Neovim as a replacement for VS Code? Probably a no-brainer, it's almost exactly the same features with less bloat anyways, but as a replacement for Jetbrains editors? I don't think the answer is that obvious.
Exactly, nail on the head. The JetBrains IDEs are crazy powerful as orchestration tools, and once you get used to the refactor functionality, or their built in Git functionality tools (which I still haven't seen anywhere else), trying to use another editor feels like I'm trying to work without arms.
@@thebluriam JetBrains' git integration is terrific. That's what kept me in their camp. Refactoring is also really good though varies depending on language ( C++ > Python > Rust )
Nice summary. Reflects my experience so far.
I started with vscode, and then I discovered this ultra fast vim thing, spent some time figuring some stuff up in vim script most of which I did not understand at that time. Kinda turned me off for wome time
Then I tried a neovim and I finally loved it: telescope, treesitter, lualine, LSPs and everything else everything works nice. I can now even change my theme vased on what hour is it for day/night more comfortable coding.
But can't say I'm comfortable with it enough to be as productive as I am in vscode. Especially in large codebases vs starting new projects. I am yet to figure out actually useful go-to definition, like in vscode its just ctrl+click on function. I know I'll learn to set it up someday, but it just takes time
Your arguments are equals of mine, I only spent time months ago to configure Neovim Plugins. Sometimes I only add new keybinds, but its rare and don't use Copilot or similiar, vim motions its enough for me!
We saw that nexxeln don't found the right configuration configuration, I use Telescope a lot, ps that use Grep to find something and recently Fugitive and I can't go back to VSCode, Eclipse or Intellij. Other thing that I saw is the people like a lot of these IDEs to debug code is more easy than Neovim.
I'd like to share a bit of my personal dev experience. I first started learning coding in Swift, and as you can imagine the only available option (for a newbie) was Xcode. Then I tried out FE (JS+React) and switched to VS Code.
Oh my, how fast and fluent it felt in comparison to Xcode. Even on a less prominent windows laptop that had an i5 that ran at 2.4 Ghz when turboing. However, when I landed my first FE job and loaded a real (rather massive project), that laptop started throttling all the way + it had all of its 16 Gb of Ram filled up.
So, I was handed a more performant machine with an i7 (up to 5Ghz) and 32 Gb of Ram. When the project is 'on', my computer sits at 20Gb flat. There was an argument made in this video that dev software running better on newer hardware is only a temporary thing. And I tend to agree but in a way that you will always have to upgrade to more powerful hardware as the time gets by.
P.S. It was my first big project and I got completely lost in its folder hierarchy. I can't imagine how one can navigate through 'thick woods' without visual prompts in IDE's like Vim or NVim.
I left Neovim because of plugin exhaustion; I’ve been using Helix. I like the default motions better, though I miss some features a lot.
Legit question: I use nvim-tree in my setup and can't really picture not using it. If you're working on a large project, or a new one, what do you do to familiarize yourself with the codebase and navigate around if you don't use a file explorer?
nvim-tree is nice.
lir and oil are also good.
I also limit big nvim config change to big refactors every so often. I used my first version for close to a year and just last month did a full re-write (trying lazy and some other plugins I was curious about). Not expecting to do much other than bug fixes for a while.
i started with Sublime, then Eclipse, then Brackets. I settled with VSCode because, really the massive amounts of extensions is just too useful to ignore. i feel like the versatility of VSCode really boils down to how much time your willing to spend learning it and configuring what you want to do with it. i made my workspace config MONTHS ago and only ever move things around when something annoys the crap outa me enough to spend an hour trying to fix it. Visual Studio annoyed the BAjeezus outa me so much I managed to make VSCode compile C++ JUST SO i dont ever have to use the god awful VS.
VS feels like the team developing it had some Romeo Juliet level family infighting and refuse to use any of the tools, features, and dev experiences that made VSCode the world champ.
as someone with zero experience in neovim who works with jupyter notebooks on a daily basis. is it possible to use .ipynp files in neovim and if so how good does it work?
It makes me feel so old that someone's first text editor was vscode... I was coding long before vscode or even electron was out and I'm only 20...
One thing I feel like this article touched on but didn’t really address directly is that numerous neovim plugins do not have nice defaults like VSCode plugins do. They’re way more configurable, but you have to spend a ton of time screwing around with things to get it right. Every VSCode plug-in I’ve ever used basically worked out of the box and if you wanted to then configure it further you could do that.
VSCode is also way more portable. Understandably so since neovim plugins have a focus on speed, and portable languages like typescript are not known for being “blazingly fast”. But for somebody like me who has to work on both windows and Linux, the process of keeping parity between my systems was too much of a pain to be worth it. Especially when many plugins and even NVim itself essentially have a “Windows 2nd” (if at all) mentality
any thoughts on micro? NGL just copying a micro and a scoop distro in the parent dir of whatever project is pretty cool. Also people should learn programming with an interpreted language in the REPL not in vscode. After that, you should treat the compiler as your ide while you learn a systems language.
Can you pin plugin versions? So an update with a breaking change doesn't clobber your config?
The description you have for how you handle your NeoVim config is pretty analogous to taking a look at how you organize an office or physical workshop. Set it up right and once or twice a year double check it is working for you the way you want
I was a hardcore vim user and later neovim when it started, during more than 5 years, when VScode came out I switched for similar reasons. Happy with that decision.
probably a dumb question - can one run step by step debugger in neovim (for, say, golang)?
I never got the copilot thing, if i want boilerplate i can either get snippets for that or i can just ask chat gpt, i don't need it bothering me when i didn't ask it to do anything
Sometimes its just nice to have a text editor that doesn't segmentation fault on a regular basis.
Which editor are you referring to? Could you be more specific, please?
well its definitely not neovim @@ncpeaksean4278
It similar I think with programmable keyboards; I own one now since a few weeks, and now only sometimes add one extra binding and just get used to the current good-enough setup. I get the trap of forever configuring but I'm in control of myself apparently.
I just use an ever so slightly modified AstroNvim for most things (read: Rust) but any time I need to work with web dev, jupyter notebooks or any kind of those very "integrated" workflows I go for VSCode. It's just a question of using the right tool for the right job like always.
A happy vim user since 2004 (and now neovim, also evaluating helix and kakoune). Tried emacs a few times, weird I never got it. My use case for vim/nvim is pretty minimalist: text editor, not IDE, mail client, project management tool blambla. Once its configured, I rarely make major change. Maybe I'm not that obsessive about tweaking every part of it.
BTW, sometimes I use MacVim/VimR. VSCode and Sublime are also fine.
Hi. I too have a Lemur Pro from System76 - rock on 🤘🏼. Been curious about Neovim myself; looking to give it a try
He made a remark about the typescript lsp being the same speed on nvim and vscode. My typescript lsp is probably 3x slower then vscode. Does anyone have any idea why I could be having that problem?
I have used nvim exclusively for development for about 18 months and have been through about 5 different configs and have never found a solution.
been learning svelte and i was having so many issues with the svelte lsp in neovim that i had to switch to vscode. additionally, the svelte extension for vscode just improves the dev experience so much. still using neovim for everything else though.
Yeah it's very weird how svelte + nvim is worse than the vsc extension despite both being based on the lsp. It's weird. I still prefer neovim for svelte just because of how fast neovim can be compared to vscode for me.
I'm developing a svelte project with neovim, till know, didnt have any problems
Interesting, I've never had a problem with Svelte in neovim. VSCode was much easier to set up with ESLint and Prettier though
I had some issues, like treesitter is not injected in css parts
i just ignore it, for me good enough is fine
I use neovim for script writing, vscode for general coding, Intellij Idea for Java coding, Emacs for note taking, Vim for default editor to edit command (the C-x C-e stuff). I love all these tools.
i started with ubuntu and vscode 6y ago, used arch and vim only for like 2y and now i just mostly use ubuntu and vscode again but i get things running and fixed in seconds instead of hours, still use vim for quick things and boot arch as daily driver but for development its rly nice to be able to open up and work on a big project anywhere in seconds
I don't think my Vim config changed significantly between 2012 and circa 2020. I setup the plugins for the frameworks I was using, it was working really well, and then I just got on with being fast with it. Tmux too; I invested the time in learning and configuring that once, never needed to revisit.
Now I tend to take a look at the config every couple of years, or if I need to set it up for something totally new (e.g. picking up TypeScript) that depends on a good chunk of extra plugins or infrastructure like the LSP.
13:59 When you customise vim so much, how do you cope when you SSH somewhere and use vim on another machine? Does’t that get annoying? Or do you set up neovim and your config on every server you remote to?
Most people who use vim know how to use the base configuration and how to change basic settings
I just restarted my config. Didn’t use Lazy until now, and the only reason I did now was because Packer got archived.
Half an hour later I was reading the docs for native package support. I’m not using a package managing plugin again.
Whats the issue with the settings json for vscode? Seems simple enough, no? Never used neovim.
Regarding copilot, it's not just fancy code completion. The ability to generate large blocks of (mostly) functional code quickly is a game changer.
I was skeptical at first, but once I got copilot working well in neovim, my productivity has increased significantly.
Couple of questions if I may:
1) what languages do you use? Phyton? TS/JS? I haven't used copilot yet, so I don't know if there's a difference in capabilities there.
2) any tutorial or resource you would recommend to set it up on neovim?
Thanks!
I mean snippets existed before, for generating larger blocks of code. vim had the plugin ultisnips plugin
This is kinda the reason why I switched from vscode and neovim to Emacs, not any variant, just vanilla Emacs with a book guide to help me with the most important keybindings. I don't even have plugins installed yet except for a few must-have, most functionality is in a responsive GUI, which already makes it less buggy and easier than neovim, but it's super fast compared to VSCode especially if you run it as a daemon. It's all about use cases and how much time you spend tinkering stuff compared to how much time you're actually productive
The title gave me a split-second heart attack
3:58 you can easilly hide it with ctrl+B and use search bar with ctrl+P to navigate withinn project, and for some people it might be even faster way to do it
Finally!
Oh.. It's a reaction
9:51 - 10:00 This good point, and I am in this team. I use Arch, join group Arch with a lot of people love to ricing WM + Neovim. But that never bother me to try it and go too deep.
Neovim default setting is enough and just start coding, work is done, and we can to do other stuff with people we love, friend, build new network, or improve our skills in other fields.
actually i am very happy to use neovim now.
i tried notepad++ / netbeans / vscode / atom / dreamweaver many years ago and their speed made me frustrated.
even i don't have time to learn lua, still i can download some professional works to make my neovim beautiful and efficient.
i have used neovim for about nine months, and i can do coding, markdown note-taking, doing latex exercises, all in neovim.
yes, i am doing note-taking also since notion is too slow for long notes.
the most important thing is , i do not need to move my hand to and fro keyboard and mouse anymore.