My Neovim setup is a fully fledged code editor, note taker, and general text editor. I do all my file editing and Neovim and I'm never looking back.
I used Eclipse and Visual Studio growing up and never thought to much about it. When I started using IntelliJ and other JetBrains products I realized how much of a difference your editor can make. When I started doing more web development I used VSCode as my primary editor.
When I came to college I started with handwritten notes
and later switched to my iPad. I found that on both
platforms my organization and handwritting was so
bad that it was not even worth going back to my
notes, which frustrated me. I started taking
all my notes in Google Docs - not knowing
that I was basically writing LaTeX by using the Google
Docs shortcuts like \frac. In my second year I switched
to Obsidian (because of No Boilerplates video) which I
fell in love with. My notes were very organized, on my
own computer, had fancy LaTeX equations, and hand
drawn portions (excalidraw). Overall, I loved Obsidian
but it became frustratingly slow with over 10 plugins,
and was very hard to write my own plugins for because
of its poorly documented API.
I had tried learning Vim keybinds multiple times but the steep learning curve always steered me away eventually. Inspired by ThePrimagen, I decided to give it another shot. I enalbed Vim-mode on Obsidian and VSCode. After around 2 weeks I became frustrated with their Vim implementations and decided to make my Neovim config.
I wanted a lot from Neovim and I was very picky so it
took me quite some time to get to a place I was happy
with. Setting up Neovim as a code editor was not
too difficult and had a lot of resources. For note
taking its a bit of a different story. I didn't really
like obsidian.nvim because it was a lot more than
I wanted. I tried to make my own preview plugin
using Pandoc and WebView but it was too slow. Eventually
I landed on peek.nvim which is pretty much exactly
what I wanted.
This argument is actually two-fold - there is why Vim keybindings and why Neovim. For the keybindings its a no brainer. Its a steep learning curve, but if you stick with it you can signifcantly improve you're programming speed. All I can say is that I really wish I started using Vim keybindings sooner.
The argument for Neovim is much less strong. It's like using Arch Linux. If you are editor nerd/power user and love to tweak every little thing and have it just how you want - you should use Neovim. Otherwise Neovim might be too much hassle than its worth.
- Zen/minimal distractions -> 1 file in view at a time (ex. file explorer is full screen)
- Load fast
- No Sacrifices - If I liked in feature in Obsidian or VSCode I will figure out how to get it into neovim
- Quickly move between files (
harpoon+telescopeis goated) - No mouse (its mostly disabled)
- Package Manager:
Lazy - Git:
Fugitive - LSP:
nvim-lspconfig + Mason - Formatter:
conform.nvim - Linter:
nvim-lint - Status Bar:
lualine - File Explorer:
neo-tree(although usually I will use yazi externally) - Markdown Preview:
peek.nvim(my forked version) - File Search:
telescope - Quick Switcher:
harpoon(basically simulated tabs, but better) - Theme:
nightfox(with no/black background) - AI:
pygptI didn't like any other implementations so I wrote my own plugin to interact with the Python Anthropic API (written in python because the API is and you shouldn't be converting their API to Lua because then you have to maintain it all the time). Uses full buffers/pages instead of floating.- *NOTE: I have basically stopped using GPT models to code. Hallucinations are a big issue, you can become too reliant on them (in the long term actually slowing you down), and docs/StackOverflow is better 9/10 times. I think this video provides some good insight on the topic too.
- Other Useful:
undotree: View your entire undo tree/history, even from past sessionsinc-rename: Rename all occurances of variablecomment.nvim: Easily comment/uncomment selection