Why I Left Nvim | Prime Reacts
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ก.ย. 2024
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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.
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
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 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'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
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
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
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
So what you are suggesting here is that NeoVIM is a great tool for those that can 80/20, but a very real trap for perfectionists.
Going to save you some time. The guy left nvim because of copilot, and a new mac m1.
Mostly because of copilot.
Stop talking about VS Code, when you hardly know stuff. I've been on the Vim ecosystem for the last 10 years, and I can definitely say VS Code is superior "now". Again, at 11:27 you can just use Cmd + P to instantly jump to whatever file you want. What's the fuss about?
Vim out of the box has a horrible user experience. I wrote a *Vim Cheat Sheet for Programmers* which mentions how to make Vim not suck out-of-the-box:
:set nocompatible ruler laststatus=2 showcmd showmode number
:set incsearch ignorecase smartcase hisearch
:set shortmess+=I
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.
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
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 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!
Thank you for the video. I actually liked it much more than the twitch style since you were more focused on the article and your point of view instead of interacting with a live chat. Very nice take, keep it up!
The "everyday editor tinkerers" smells a lot like some "Brook's Law" ... The Second System Effect ... lack of a clear concept (goal) and maintaining conceptual integrity. If you don't have a concrete goal then you should take a step back and understand what you're trying to accomplish ... perhaps break something down into smaller goals .. because the constant tinkering is you trying to reach some "unknown state" and it will never be satisfied ... the reason why C is the goto for systems programming and C++ can't add enough features ... it lost its purpose years ago
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
Every 6-8 months? A new job or a project on a new stack are main reasons to look at emacs config for me 😊
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
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.
For a second i thought prime had left nvim
I thought you switched to Helix (I hoped). Anyway, I will wait until you do no matter how long it takes.
Helix is a godsend for me. Using it for Golang and Rust without any plugins and it just works
Meme of "personalized" vim needs to die. You can't call it personalized if you are running so much 3rd party plugins that updating them breaks everything.
Vim lost its minimalism long time ago. I'd say around version 6ish(it was long ago), when it added spellchecking. Its runtime increased drastically.
These days I see "highly configurable and tinkerable" as "we are too lazy and our software is too bad to provide good defaults".
If I wanted ultimate tinkering, I would use emacs anyway.
Two things:
1. more "no twitch" videos. When you don't have to satisfy the chat's insanity, you are far more focused on the material at hand. Like, please, consider a bit of TH-camr in your streamer flow.
2. Do I like *vim's speed? yes. Do I like its efficiency? yes. Do I absolutely hate that I can't literally "point and click" and get an extension for what I am working on? yes. Do I love that VS Code will detect language / environment and immediately offer extension suggestions and if I concur it automatically downloads them and installs them? Hell yes.
Can we bring this thing to neovim? Can I just open a repo and have it understand "oh, you are working with Java in here. I see you don't have a JAVA_HOME. Would you like me to install JDK and maven/gradle plugins for you and auto-setup everything, from LSP to code running to debugging to testing with a click of a button so you can immediately work on the code?" Get neovim there for all the major languages / platforms / whathaveyous and we' re golden.
Speed is the most inconsequential thing when it comes to programming, most professional programmers will spend most of their time reading other peoples code then writing any new code anyways, so I don't understand wasting time memorizing shortcuts and setting up config files etc. for some command line editor when you can just install Sublime, VSCode, or any other modern IDE and get to work instantly right out of the box, almost all of these programs come with some form of command pallet with fuzzy search, so you don't even have to learn any of the menus or keyboard shortcuts, just type the initial of whatever command you want to run, it will be the first result in the command palette window and you just have to press enter, if you run a command frequently enough, then you can setup / learn it's keyboard shortcut, for everything else just use the palette
My problem with neovim is 2 fold. 1. I don't want node.js on my system. The other LSPs don't seem to work.
2. I started working with unity. And neovim is a nightmare to work with in unity.
I used to use nano. I still do, but I used to, too.
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.
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
Inferior. 10:50. The word is inferior. But brain do be like dat sometimes. Me liky nvim. Me will start learning it!
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.
The installation and management of plugins was the main reason I was thinking of moving over to emacs and later VCS. I never really managed because the bindings never really work and because if you nave to jump through multiple languages, NVim/Vim have always felt easier.
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 was trying to use nvim but there is just too much configuration and doing it on windows is just painful...
3:58 yes, it is.
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
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.
What about emacs?
I think emacs is better because it has a bunch of games and that really cool calculator.
I have had VSCode exts break before, FYI... it can happen...
oh yeah ... VS code is shit and IntelliJ IDEA (or in this context WebStorm) is much more superior lol. But if let bs out, vim is cool to do quick things on target remote machine over ssh, vscode is good for small projects. scripts editing's and such. But when you need to work on a big python/java project with databases and such - normal big fat IDE is what you actually need.
If you use neovim for big project, why waste time even installing it for small config files?
Just use neovim for all kind of editing (except java and c#. Those two are a pain in neovim)
One month later: Why I left VSCode | Prime Reacts
The best thing for me was switching from neovim to helix and learning that kakoune bindings exist, they are so much better than vims
I also switched to helix but I did not know about kakoune before. I think the bindings are mostly like vim, you just select before you execute something. I love that helix has all I need built into it and is so easy to configure and even to write own functionality, though some rough edges still exist (basically some inconsistencies).
Helix is underrated and solves all the issues mentioned here which are much the same as my complaints I have loved it so far
I am glad to find fellow Helix users here 😁
I really liked Helix after trying the tutor but my vim muscle memory is too transferable to switch to something else :(
@raenastra yeah dd was a pain
But now whenever I'm on a system without helix, xd is a pain))
Helix editor for development, and yes tree view coming up soon!
The complaints about the plugins makes me want to use helix.
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
Inferior is the word you were looking for
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..
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...
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'm still in vimplug...
Seriously, It works and it is fast. What other features do people need?
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.
I didn't get a point when his packages broke. I use Plug which has lock file and it locks all commits. If I want to update packages (which I didn't do for 2 years and I'm fine) I do it in a separate branch and check that all works before I merge it back. Obviously I plan some time to make updates.
Plugins for VsCode can also break which I felt myself.
Again it's not necessary to update your config and try all new packages if you don't need to.
I guess this thing sums up a bit my experience as well: nvim has nice set of plugins, has couple fine precollected setups (astro/lazy/kcikstart) but...
If you have freebsd you want to talk with - nothing will save you. vscode fails to work with csh, neovim fails with installing majority of the LSP plugins, even lua_lsp doesn't work. So it requires bolts and screws to make it work, and i never got to the end where everything works flawlessly, since it'll consume so much more time. Half of it true for windows as well.
Astrovim/Lazyvim/other basically try to mimic vscode behavior in terminal, but in vim way. Okay for starters, pain for advanced users. Hell on the inside part.
Another issue - terminal multiplexers. tmux, screen, zellij - if you run nvim there you'll have tons more tiny issues you need to fix to be productive enough - colors, keybindings, clipboard. And no, nvim is not good as multiplexer by itself, especially if some connection hangs - you can't just kill certain buffer, because it doesn't made that way. Working with :terminal kinda painful and doesn't respect many things you have in regular terminal.
I use windows at home. And windows support in neovim is kinda meh. Basically it's terminals make things more complicated like multiplexers, so you need to fiddle configs one more time to make you flow productive. And config becomes slightly unportable for those reasons. So not nvim config to rule them all.
Vscode/Sublime has some pretty unique behaviors unreproducable in nvim, at least for now - there's no such plugin to select things like does in sublime/vscode. Multiline editing in nvim sucks. There's no good substitutes in neovim for these. Many such little things also non existent by default and require more hours to configure.
For some reason LSPs works only half of the time and I have no idea how to check whats wrong with them. Also it will consume a lot of time like porting things i mentioned above.
And generally C/C++ LSP sucks and if you has to cross compile or build system has weird quirks combined of shell, python and makefiles you basically have no chance to receive LSP assistance. Or you do, but I guess no one can guess when and why. It's a deep deep dive in the compiler's world. Took me hours of attempts to make it somewhat behave consistently but I failed it in the end.
The minor issue is the way of installing neovim. On non-RR distrubutions it requires some workarounds because default repos will have outdated versions. So it basically cries "make install me". Just aint good.
And finally - if your alphabet is not just ascii you also will have some fun time.
So my setup generally is a weird combination of nvim, vscode and some other editors, working side by side inside this zoo environment.
I keep going back and forth between nvim, VS Code, and Helix. Every time I go back to VS Code I find something stupid with it. Last time there were rendering errors that drove me bonkers.
Helix is great, except not for debugging, and the way multiple cursors is handled is just awkward for me. Nvim is in fact a pain to set up. It just is. But once it’s set up it’s awesome.
Finally!
Oh.. It's a reaction
I wanna say I wish editors had more cool schemes
Monokai doesn't do it for me, I need something that allows me to fulfill my tech priest fantasies dammit!
Two words: fcpg/vim-fahrenheit
The title gave me a split-second heart attack
I strongly prefer nvim because I can put it on my remote dev desktop, and then the machine i physically use doesn’t matter much. The device gets out of the way. I can backup my configs and have a full setup ready on a new dev host in a single clone + init.
I solved this by not really using that lot of plugins. Like honestly need no tree views, minimaps, no bullshit, not even git integration I need if I have a terminal open for it and that is it. Just plain vim with some stuff in my vimrc and that is all.
Not only that helps with not at all needing to "keep up" with plugins (I literally spend ZERO - 0 hours on that) but also helps being familiar with all vim installations on any server whatsoever.
Also maybe know your shiny new machine can handle the javascript electron bullshit slowness of VSCode, but trust me it will get more and more bloated and slow with time and you end up throwing out your machine faster just to run a fuckin' editor LOL. But to be honest even on my strong work laptop.... I hate anything electron... it is so...b l o a t e d l y S L O W!!! I agree with Prime here: its annoying when you sense that what you type is not immidiate!
I use nvim tree, because it is just easier for creating files/folders, and I spent way too much time trying to get netrw to work the way I like.
But I agree, I don't have FOMO over plugins for vscode. I try to keep the number of plugins to a minimum
@@calder-ty I just learned that creating a file is '%' and creating a dir is 'd'. Really not that hard to remember, but indeed something to remember not just configure as you wish.
Copilot Chat is running 3.5, so it's fairly useless in my experience. I do find myself using regular copilot quite a lot, mostly as autocomplete++ essentially. But I wouldnt want to go back to not using/having it available now.
I had the same experience with Copilot Chat when I was testing it with VSCode, it can be useful, but most of the time it's Meh, I think it needs to be GPT4. That said, I find that CoPilot in line in the editor is perfect for writing code that I find annoying to write or that I don't want to have to think about.
I ditched my AI assistant last week, I'm worried I leave it on and accidentally leak company secrets to the training model and the benefits it gives isn't that great tbh sometimes it's good but it's not always good all the time such that I need it.
I love code runner but no alternative in neovim ☹️
My rule is that I don't change things unless they're actually a problem, and I solve problems, not inconveniences.
It's not uncommon for me not to significantly touch configs for up to years on end unless I'm doing something outside of my past considerations, and that's just as it ought to be. It can be fun to tweak and to spend a lot of time creating a strong initial setup, but it gets really tiring sometimes making sure every program has non-horrible ff and fi ligatures and such.
If I ever have extremely substantial reason to nuke my system or existing configs that's when I pull out my notes on inconveniences and important things and only then do I get blasting on config shenaniganary.
yeah, also it is easy to make small changes here and there and get used to them over time and not even being aware of the level of customization you are engaging with every day until for whatever reason you find yourself out of your setup struggling to make anything because everything you do out of your muscular memory doesn't work anymore.-
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.
I spent 20 hours configuring my Neovim setup. I spent 15 mins setting up my VS Code setup.
Using Neovim taught me how to setup VS Code in a more efficient way.
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.
Yeah. This is the reason I can't fully switch to neovim. And I use Geany as a main editor for many years. Very often I use just vim. And the only plugin I have installed on vim is ale and this makes it amazing, while staying minimal. I installed lazy on neovim, migrated to init.lua as config and I still try to figure out how to install and setup ale for neovim, but just can't. I spent few days trying to figure out what I need for python, where to get it, how to set lazy to install it and the more I try to do this, the more I realize how much time it takes me from coding. This is ridiculous. Meanwhile Geany just works (i run flake8, mypy and black manually), vim just work and ale makes it great and neovim just stands with the lazy installed and nothing else. Tons of people offer bloated configs for nvim which I don't want to do. So for now can't use neovim.
I try to learn neovim, the controls remind me of QWOP and setting anything up feels like getting a phd.
This guys productivity has increased so much from using vim that he has enough time to make these videos. The point sells itself.
The Best is the enemy of the Good.
vscode plugins break all the time. If you get your vim to a stable point and just stop updating your plugins you'll be fine. I only upgrade once a year or so
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
good enough is perfectly adequate nothing wrong with that in fact good enough is exactly what most employers want you to do. It's usually a waste of time and money otherwise
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
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 actually started my dev life in vim (on the recommendation that vim + LaTeX was the best way to take math notes) and later switched to nvim. The primary reason I keep coming back to IntelliJ is that development in JVM languages is awful in vim/neovim. I can never get the lsp to work properly with gradle and when I finally get something usable I realize the experience is still much worse than using IntelliJ.
Not sure if it’s in your wheelhouse, but it would be really awesome if you could put out a tutorial on getting set up with neovim + Java dev. I’ve watched and followed so many tutorials and I’m never happy with the result.
to me the biggest upsite with vim is that I can code on a damn small box remotely via ssh and still have ECC support directly - that doesn't even work on VScode remote dont get me with the hardware requirements started even.
My whole dev box runs very happy with 512mb and 1vcpu with everything I need and costs up to nothing.
I went vim -> neovim because it simplified my config. Then I went neovim -> helix for the same reason. A similar comparison would be (dozen plugins and 100+ loc config) -> (half dozen plugins and ~100 loc config) -> (~20 loc config). I am about to go nuclear (ansible) with my dotfiles/config because it is such a pain right now keeping things in sync between multiple pc's across diffrent OSes.
Outside your constant circus here..Do you work on something ? Next..why I went back to emacs..5 months later why I switch to ed or nano..Why VSCode is better than Textadept...(a good idea for your next video).
2 months ago....From VSCode to Vim....
Tell us a bit about your toilet paper also...why I ditch my pink color toilet paper....
I think it's sort of wild to prefer the VSC plugin system over nvim. Sure it's easy, but it's also a nightmare to config and some plugins are just... well bad. I love VCS but one of the reasons I'm actually switching to nvm is because the plugin system is just a horrible experience when you work with multiple techs.
I think the only thing which really stands out for VSC is the ability to overwrite local developer settings with the .vscode/ configs. If you're a seasoned programmer, you can just delete it, but if you have a junior it's an amazingly quick way to onboard them into having the required plugins and settings for them. Like if you have a very opinionated way to do Typescript and this is made userfriendly by VSC plugins, then it's just a nice help for newbies while anyone who's worked with TS for a while in VSC likely already has a great setup.
I pulled an HP Probook 650 G1 out of non weather proof storage with a dead battery, running Windows 8.
Wiped/Installed fedora Linux that I'd never used before, vscode, and recently podman container system, running flawlessly. The only upgrade i made was a 1TB sata SSD, and now i don't wait to boot.
LXD was super resource hungry and incompatible with docker, so i switched to podman with no regrets.
This Laptop would have been thrown in the trash. Hardware is rarely the bottleneck, it's usually shit like old school electron apps.
I think to use a IDE like vim/ intellij / vscode, etc. to learn to program is bullshit. No IDE can teach you how to code. you have to know what you want to do. than you are typeing in the right commands, depends on the language you're using, and the IDE will support your actions with autocomplete or suggestions.
IDE also helps you with debugging or syntax check. An IDE will never telling you put your first command here the second there. You will have better luck if you're using ChatGPT, this will perform some code snippet for you who might will just work as you want.
Totally understand this dev’s perspective - but Copilot has worked flawlessly for me and I’m on nightly. But it’s because I’ve disabled all other other autocompletion and snippets.
The second complaint I’d like to call out is the one related to comparing the plug-in ecosys to that of JavaScript’s. Because nvim is newish, it’s still evolving and stabilizing. And this person left while introducing the solution to their problem with sync - going from packer to lazy. Lazy.nvim is probably gonna stick given the prolific nature of the contributions of its author to the ecosys much like Junegunn and Plug. I, too, hadn’t switched away from Plug, because I have to figure out how to move my Vim-lang configs into its lua-spec.
I work on remote hosts from time to time and because I have a hardened workflow that’s CLI-based, it’s just as easy to work there. I think I would lose this using VSC
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.
Just installed Neovim because I thought it’s better than using Vim. But I remembered I could just ssh to it with my VSCode.
People use Vim for the keyboard wizardry. I just buy a good programmable keyboard. Same efficiency and can use the shortcuts outside the editor.
To each his own.
My own is Neovim
My own is yours
Well... after all that "ricing" madness a year ago i just wiped out all my configs. Installed few plugins and left them almost unconfigured. I left pretty much everything vanilla. And since then... it broke just a few times and even then the fix was simple. So... my suggestion is to STOP. Stop tweaking every single aspect. You will NOT get more productive because you have gazillion of fancy bindings which you can't remember. You will not get better programmer because of your fancy custom theme or status line. Etc. Etc. Keep it simple.
"Configuring VIM was a lot of fun"
Fug you, this was not fun at all.
UPD +1 to plugin breaking changes problem and PackerSync nuke
also it is not that easy to apply your settings and plugins to fresh installation of nvim, you need to install packer manually first, then open vim and run Sync command
yeah, you can do that via some scripting, but is there any other text editor that makes you do that?
I actually started with neovim and used it for about a year, then migrated to vim about 6 months ago after tree sitter crashed nvim (and claimed there was something wrong with my C tool chain????) somehow causing me to mess up the file I was working on.
The switch to vim has been night and day. Syntax highlighting should not depend on my C tool chain. ik I don’t have to use treesitter, it was just the most flagrant example. But in general I found these kinds of weird malfunctions that need to be traced to a plugin or component somewhere in my system a theme. After setting vim up, I have not gotten ONE SINGLE ERROR from my editor.
I have all the same features… (except treesitter; I don’t miss it for obvious reasons… I was no stranger to its cryptic messages). My editor works 100% when I update my plugins; most of them haven’t been fundamentally altered in years, and breaking changes are generally a hard no-no in vim land. Tons of recent commits to a plugin (especially for simple plugins) is typically a red flag.
Also vimscript is fantastic if you use it as it was designed. It gets a lot of flak for no reason imo, it’s just different from other languages so people often don’t realize how to use it to its potential. A side note- anecdotally, chatgpt is really good at scripting in vimL and makes it an even more insane tool even if you don’t know it well.
Regarding speed there hasn’t been a perceptible difference afaict. On my m1 MacBook vim opens instantly and I have a relatively heavy config. Maybe it’s a different story on older hardware?
TLDR neovim and vim are the same editor except vim never crashes
Sorry for venting, no hate to neovim, I just don’t think it’s a mature editor yet. Not to say it won’t be in the future. I would love to hear other perspectives on this
FOMO considered harmful.
Electron considered harmful thus VSCode considered harmful.
Summary : A latte enjoyer soydev who can't control his ricing urges is blaming that on neovim and contradicting himself by saying vscode is also configurable (yet he doesn't spend time doing it there), not using a great tool because it's configurable is the pinnacle of nonsense, just configure once and then tweak every few mnths like prime said, I've probably changed my i3 config just a handful of times in 4 years besides switching border colors.
Not even mentioning his "problems" with copilot, it's instant with the lua extension, same for tsserver, and I've used vscode for quite a while so i can compare.
And he doesn't want to use a neovim distro because of bloat although you can easily remove what you consider bloat but is using vscode which is way more bloated ? (And he would prefer to configure himself although that's what he despised at the beginning ) Seriously buy this dude a logic.
Windows keybinding are much better, than Vim keybindings. You save the document with Ctrl+S, you move the cursor with arrow keys, you copy text with Ctrl+C, you type text by typing.
Vs-code I don't like it, but others do. Good for them. At the moment I am learning Vim. I am not sure about NeoVim. I touch type IE: 10 finger typing. I am a low level coder. I like a simple console, and I don't need flashy graphics.
Keep your vimplug. Keep your packer. Dont install lazynvim. As soon as you install it something will change. The guy behind that pj is always talking about lazy load and shit, it is for the fastest but I often find my workflow slower than it was. There is always something loading in the background. And the fomo of profiler and keep optimizing and optimizing more. The community (plugins) around lazy keep creating break changes and ruin my day. I dont think lazy is worth my time
2:23 lol, but some Terminals are already on electron themselves )) overall I like it when U.S. people making 50-250k a year, bragging about their old laptops. How much is a mac m1 these days? 1.5k?
The argument agains neovim distros is very stupid. With that line of though you should be running your own custom Linux From Scratch installation, running on your custom architecture in a FPGA that you built using stones as sticks.
For me, Astro NVim is great, it has everything I need preinstalled and preconfigured and if I need extra features I can add community plugins. It's great.
I am a pianist, so I could learn Neovim's keybindings. Is it executive dysfunction that prohibits my claim to the programming throne? Or am I doomed to vskiddie status my whole life?
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.
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.