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Thanks, some helpful insights here. (It sounds like the summary is, “set it up and don't fiddle with it too much.”) I agree that the neovim community is great
by modernerd 4y ago
Thanks, some helpful insights here. (It sounds like the summary is, “set it up and don't fiddle with it too much.”)
I agree that the neovim community is great and neovim is of course very hackable, although there's always room to improve: an API for terminal UI would help a lot when writing neovim plugins and make everything feel more consistent, for example.
> I don’t know what process you took, but properly learning the tool from the ground up and minimally adding useful plugins as you go should not take much time at all.
I built a neovim config from scratch, used built-in docs, community support, and well-known extensions when needed. I wrote small Lua plugins when I couldn't find extensions or workflows that worked for me. And I had fun doing it!
I got something good in a weekend, something very decent in a week or two, but still had a lot of gaps between what I had and what I wanted (session save, restore and quick switching; a Magit-like staging and forge management UI for GitHub CLI -driven PR management; invoking and managing long-running terminal processes from the editor; find/replace in large numbers of files across big projects with something more intuitive than a quickfix list; linting with something lighter-weight and easier to configure alongside LSP servers than ale; quicklists for LSP issues; a simple test runner with quicklist for errors; I can go on…).
After trying out extensions for some of those things but finding nothing that fit the bill, I played with Emacs and had a pretty similar experience there (weeks of work just to reach parity with VSC+a few extensions). I concluded I was wasting my time — it was pretty clear I was after an IDE more than a text editor at this point. VS Code seemed a nice in-between option. There are things I miss from vim/Emacs (speed, keyboard-driven workflow, getting to enjoy and celebrate editors with a community of likeminded weirdos), which is why I tend to get sucked in by these update announcements and discussions. But for the most part VSC is fine.