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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Thoughts on Neovim</title>
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<h1>
Thoughts on Neovim
<span class="subtitle">Who even needs an IDE anyways?</span>
</h1>
<h2>Why I'm using Neovim</h2>
<p>
When I first started coding in high school and then later in early
college I used to jump around between editors a lot more than I do today.
I used Notepad++, then Visual Studio, briefly Netbeans, then Atom.
</p>
<p>
But since settling into frontend web development I've stayed with VSCode
for a very long time. I liked it because it was straightforward to get
started with, but versatile enough to extend for other languages.
Between various jobs and projects I used it for Javascript, Java, C#,
Rust, and C - and it did admirably at pretty much all of these.
</p>
<p>
But about a year ago I saw that VSCode had a Neovim plugin, and I was
intrigued. I'd wanted to get more familiar with Vim beyond the basic
hjkl navigation, and this seemed like a great way to do that!
</p>
<p>
So for the last year and change I've had the
<a target="_blank" href="https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=asvetliakov.vscode-neovim">vscode-neovim</a>
plugin installed, and I've been really enjoying it!
</p>
<p>
I quickly fell in love with visual block mode, or the "delete N words"
commands. They're just so handy I suddenly felt like they were missing
if I needed to edit code any other way!
</p>
<p>
But over the weekend I made the jump from using Neovim inside VSCode to
using it more or less on its own. I saw a video that mentioned the
AstroNvim configuration framework and Neovide, and decided "yeah, I think
I want to try that", and a few days later . . . here we are.
</p>
<h2>How is it going?</h2>
<p>
Overall, surprisingly well.
</p>
<p>
The AstroNvim config I'm using already had NeoTree set up which is
very nice. I've figured out how to get ESLint and Prettier configured
for work, rust-analyzer installed for my own projects, I've been poking
at themes over and over again, and honestly . . . I'm really liking this.
</p>
<p>
Getting Neovide to connect to a VM over the network was relatively
straightforward, I love how easy it is to drop my config into git and
keep it synced between computers, and finally having proper mouse support
(which I never could get sorted out with my terminal) is a pretty big
game changer for when I'm just reading code.
</p>
<p>
Also, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't love the smooth scrolling and
cursor animation. I am a simple girl after all.
</p>
<h2>Should you try replacing your IDE?</h2>
<p>
That is a tricky question to answer.
</p>
<p>
I was comfortable spending some time experimenting with this because I
already had decent familiarity with Vim and had been using Neovim
specifically for a while. If you don't have any similar experience,
the learning curve is going to be pretty steep.
</p>
<p>
But hey - if you're looking for a challenge, you'll definitely learn
a lot.
</p>
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