I recently fell down the rabbit hole of Neovim, learning how to configure my own setup through a guide by The Primeagen. It was interesting as I have been toying around with Vim in VSCode for some time now. I quite enjoy it since there’s something very comfortable about using VSCode, having all my features right at hand. I do however recognize that my set up is far from the most efficient and I’m sure I could program much more quickly and much more enjoyably if I took some time to really configure my setup.
That all being said, I can see how people have really gotten into Neovim. It was actually incredibly fun to go from 0 to LMS. Setting up the package manager and the plug-ins was truly satisfying. And the end product is really quite impressive. Much faster than VSCode with features that are quite a bit better. Having an undo-tree instead of a linear undo is quite useful and not something default in VSCode.
That said, I’m still using VSCode, there are some things in my setup that I’m not a massive fan of and I’m looking for alternative ways to fix these issues. Perhaps once I’ve gotten the setup to where I like it, then I will embrace Neovim fully, but for now VSCode just makes much more sense.
One of my issues with my neovim setup was that I realized halfway through my config was that the package manager I was using was technically deprecated, which was a surprise since the Primagen’s guide wasn’t too old. That said, I am the type of fella that wants to really dial in a setup not have to mess around with it too much after that, so the idea of a plugin or a package manager suddenly becoming deprecated doesn’t sit right with me. I might be worrying over non-issue but in my head I feel as if VScode is a little more stable than my neovim setup.
The interesting thing however is that I really do like the customizability of neovim and I had such a fun time setting up neovim and I could see myself doing more research into different plugins, perhaps make my own plugins. It’s one of those things where I have issues right now, I have some hesitation, but I had hesitation prior to using vscode over really heavy IDEs like eclipse and intellij. I think now that the idea of how good neovim could be to develop with is in the back of my mind, I’m likely to embrace it in the future.
But for now, I’m going to optimize my vscode setup a little more.