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65 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
65 lines
2.7 KiB
Markdown
1 year ago
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---
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title: Thoughts on Neovim
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subtitle: Who even needs an IDE anyways?
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---
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## Why I'm using Neovim
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When I first started coding in high school and then later in early
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college I used to jump around between editors a lot more than I do today.
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I used Notepad++, then Visual Studio, briefly Netbeans, then Atom.
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But since settling into frontend web development I've stayed with VSCode
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for a very long time. I liked it because it was straightforward to get
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started with, but versatile enough to extend for other languages.
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Between various jobs and projects I used it for Javascript, Java, C#,
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Rust, and C - and it did admirably at pretty much all of these.
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But about a year ago I saw that VSCode had a Neovim plugin, and I was
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intrigued. I'd wanted to get more familiar with Vim beyond the basic
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hjkl navigation, and this seemed like a great way to do that!
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So for the last year and change I've had the
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<a target="_blank" href="https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetliakov.vscode-neovim">vscode-neovim</a> plugin
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plugin installed, and I've been really enjoying it!
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I quickly fell in love with visual block mode, or the "delete N words"
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commands. They're just so handy I suddenly felt like they were missing
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if I needed to edit code any other way!
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But over the weekend I made the jump from using Neovim inside VSCode to
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using it more or less on its own. I saw a video that mentioned the
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AstroNvim configuration framework and Neovide, and decided "yeah, I think
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I want to try that", and a few days later . . . here we are.
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## How is it going?
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Overall, surprisingly well.
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The AstroNvim config I'm using already had NeoTree set up which is
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very nice. I've figured out how to get ESLint and Prettier configured
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for work, rust-analyzer installed for my own projects, I've been poking
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at themes over and over again, and honestly . . . I'm really liking this.
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Getting Neovide to connect to a VM over the network was relatively
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straightforward, I love how easy it is to drop my config into git and
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keep it synced between computers, and finally having proper mouse support
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(which I never could get sorted out with my terminal) is a pretty big
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game changer for when I'm just reading code.
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Also, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't love the smooth scrolling and
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cursor animation. I am a simple girl after all.
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## Should you try replacing your IDE?
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That is a tricky question to answer.
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I was comfortable spending some time experimenting with this because I
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already had decent familiarity with Vim and had been using Neovim
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specifically for a while. If you don't have any similar experience,
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the learning curve is going to be pretty steep.
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But hey - if you're looking for a challenge, you'll definitely learn
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a lot.
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