Earlier in this summer I tried to use Neovim. I tried to do some research on Lua and different neovim configs and plugins and distros and I got a basic neovim configuration going after following a tutorial from the primeagen. But alas I was overwhelemed.
The power was too much for me to handle. I thought I had to stay in my cozy vscode setup and be satisified with using vim motions.
But the idea of neovim was in my head all summer. Every key stroke in every project I thought of how tantalizing it would be to open up the project and work on it with my editor. How cool it would be to use Telescope and Harpoon and set up my own custom keymaps and color schemes. I could even build my own plugins.
What was more, I had a lot of issues with Vscode with vim motions. I found I wasn’t using vim to its full potential on vscode, not like when I was using neovim for those brief hours at the beginning of the summer.
So I went back. I learned about Kickstart, I went through the friendly manual, I read the kickstart’s init.lua file and for the first time I really understood neovim.
And because of kickstart I was acutally using neovim properly. Of course it took a lot of time and effort to really wrap my head around how the package manager worked and how to add plugins and make the configuration my own and really feel comforable with all the keymaps but this was undeniably worth it.
I have not had this much fun in programming in a long time. I think about my neovim setup and I get the craving to program again. I get tempted to make random projects just so I have an excuse to use my neovim setup.
I will say, one of the biggest things that I needed to do to make neovim work for me was install this free and open source software called Karabiner. This is because neovim uses a lot of control keys and I don’t want to reach of the control key so I use Karabiner to remap one of my command keys to control. I also swpped the caps lock and escape keys which really should just be default with the frequency I use each key.
The point is with these new key binds my neovim setup is much more comfortable to use. I don’t know whether or not this switch is necessarily faster than just using a mouse but I will say it is much more fun to program this way esepcially when I’m using my laptop and I don’t have my mouse nearby.
My setup only improved as I setup tmux, iterm2, and add plugins like Oil. At this point, development just feels so fun and so customized and I get ideas everyday for new changes to my neovim setup.
I feel liberated from vscode and awakened to a new era of development. I can at last say… neovimg by the way.