My Journey to NeoVim: From Vim Motions to Full-Time Terminal Life

In my previous article, I wrote about how I started using Vim Motions to improve my development experience and how it affected my productivity. Even though I had heard about NeoVim and all its fanciness before, when I started using Vim Motions, I thought that was as close as I could get to NeoVim. Little did I know how wrong I was.

So, where should I start?

After getting comfortable with Vim Motions and doing most operations I previously handled through graphical interfaces, I discovered tmux. I saw my colleague using it, seamlessly navigating between what I thought were windows (actually panes). I spent more time playing with it, writing endless configurations and experimenting. Since I do a lot of work stuff in the terminal - running servers, working with git, navigating between folders - tmux was a perfect match to enhance this workflow. After my muscle memory locked in all the tmux keymaps, I started thinking about how I could move more of my everyday tasks into the terminal.

Naturally, I fell down the YouTube rabbit hole. Of course, I started with ThePrimeagen and Typecraft_dev - these channels became my go-to resources. I began with Kickstart.nvim. At the time, I thought I wanted to configure everything myself, believing it was the best way to learn NeoVim and its ecosystem. While this might work for some folks, I ended up overwhelmed by all the options and ways to set up NeoVim. As Yoda once said... wait, that was Uncle Ben - "With great power comes great responsibility." I think he was talking about NeoVim.

The main power of NeoVim is its configurability, which is exactly its main disadvantage if you're used to modern IDEs like JetBrains products or VS Code. You're responsible for everything. Want to navigate through folders? Configure it. Run tests? Configure it. Search for files? You guessed it - configure it. For every little thing you'll want to do in your day-to-day work, you'll need to set it up. This sounds great until you're just trying to get started. That's why I switched to LazyVim, one of the most popular NeoVim distributions. And I still use it. I've customized a lot - changed the theme, installed several LSPs that I need, added packages to run and debug tests from the terminal, updated keymaps, added my own and made it work seamlessly with tmux. But at its core, it's still LazyVim. It handles most of the stuff you usually don't want to spend endless hours configuring: a basic working IDE, package management, etc. And yes, it's still completely NeoVim.

I won't pretend I've completely abandoned WebStorm - I still use it for most work tasks when I need something done quickly. Muscle memory takes time to develop, and I'm still more efficient with the tool I've been using for the past 5 years. But for side projects or experimenting with new programming languages, I use NeoVim exclusively. What made this transition from JetBrains products to NeoVim almost seamless was the keybindings. From day one with LazyVim, I migrated most of its shortcuts to WebStorm (thanks to the IdeaVim extension). This allowed me to practice NeoVim shortcuts in a familiar environment without additional stress.

I'm writing this article in... you guessed it... NeoVim! Almost every day, I tweak my configuration, making small adjustments to better suit my specific needs. And I absolutely love it. This is just the beginning of what I believe will be a lifelong journey, and I'm incredibly excited about it.

Keep in touch and happy coding, nerds!