Switching to nvim as an early career developer in 2024

it rocks

What led to this?

I have been working for 3 years in the .Net world living mostly in Visual Studio, and on any of my personal projects I would code in VS Code simply becuase the projects were not in .Net. As I got better at using VS Code with their command and extensions, I began to more and more view Visual Studio as big, clunky, and slow. Visual Studio is good for C#/.Net but that's pretty much it. .Net sort of forces you to use Visual Studio since it has so many built in features that are targeted for .Net development. I eventually went and tried coding .Net
apps in VS code and had a unpleasent experience so for .Net's sake I am stuck with VS until I get a little better at nvim. Nonetheless, I stumbled onto @ThePrimeagen's youtube channel and watched serveral of his takes on nvim and decided to give it a shot. Another one of my motivations for switching was to be more close to the computer when it comes to knowing what is going on under-the-hood and alot of the editor's rob you of this experience.

The Setup

What I didn't want my neovim to be was doing less coding and more customizing my editor to never actually use it in the first place. I went with LazyVim as lazy seems like the most stable nvim package manager. I went with the template version that they provide and I recreated it partially to understand how it works, but ultimately went with the template.

Progression

I was terrible when I first started using nvim. I was slow, looking at my keyboard often, I just sucked. I went room-temp-turkey, meaning during work I fully used Visual Studio and when I was working on my own stuff I would use nvim exclusively. As time when on I began picking up more tricks along the way such as dit, which means 'delete inner tag', sooooo goood. Another personal favorite of mine is the the search and replace, even though it is exactly same functionally, it is so much easier and faster to just type :%s/old/new and then boom it is done. There is something about just always being on the keyboard that is super satisfying.

Observations

Today have using nvim for a couple of months I had the though 'huh I really never use my mouse anymore'. This is usually how change goes, it is usually slow and is really noticed when you look back. I have become a better typist as a side-effect and grew closer to the terminal. Something else that happened on accident is that I am able to just remember a lot of the keybind easy since that actually mean something. The most common example of this is that gg goes to the beginning of the file, g mean 'genisis'. Or how 'd' followed by a plethora of vim motions to delete what you want. For example, those to commands that I just referenced (d & gg) can be used together. dgg will delete everything from where your cursor is to the beginning of the file! Never gets old everytime I use it.

Yeah, I recommend it

It really isn't about the speed, it is about the ease-of-use. I may be faster will it, but that's not really the point. There are just some instances in editing some text that you can just do SOO much easier in nvim than you can in something like VS or VS Code. Not to mention that nvim is just actually faster as a piece of software. So yeah, give it a try.