Neovim experience

I have been using JetBrains IDE for quite some time. I have always enjoyed its rich features, such as refactor and convenient shortcuts. Due to this appreciation, I have tried a few different JetBrains IDE, including its lite editor JetBrains Fleet (kind of a VS Code follower). Even though some of them are not so good, most of them are still very impressive. I still heavily use JetBrains IDE at work, but recently I started to re-evaluate if I should start looking for lighter alternatives.

The trigger was quite simple. I found my MacBook Air sometimes cannot hold JetBrains IntelliJ and WebStorm. It can get noticeably slow. While it’s still tolerable, but that made me wonder if I really need it for everything. Especially for my blog writing.

That leads me to the world of Vim once again. I used to look into this landscape, but the steep learning curve pushed me out of the door. After some considerations, I decided to give it another shot, and this time, I started getting into it, and I decided to spend more time to get used to it.

To give you an impression of my setup now, this is how my terminal look like as I am writing this post.

Pretty cool? Isn’t it? Actually I did nothing. All I did is just to install neovim and lazyvim. It comes with all of those IDE alike window and cool features such as spell check. I am still actively learning this, and hopefully I will get to somewhere I can confidently share more tips.

Reasons I decide to invest time in this steep learning curve:

• I am doing more and more cloud management work, where vi is heavily used;
• I only know the basics of vi, but I think it’s interesting to know its key map. As I am used to JetBrains key map, I feel more productive on JetBrains IDE than any other places, but this is also the vendor lock. Hopefully a lot of IDE supports vim key binding;
• I used to browse a BBS via terminal back in the university time. The terminal experience back then was great. It would be great to revisit that in my professional life again;
• With the current wave of AI, CLI tools are slowing getting more trendy than GUI. Maybe not an enough reason for me to switch to CLI completely, but if most of my workflow is already in CLI, then my AI workflow will become more seamlessly too.

Did I consider emacs? No, and pretty unfairly no reason. I just didn’t look at both thoroughly and made a thoughtful decision. I have seen one emacs user in my real life, and I am not sure if he would be disappointed that I come to the side of vim. This choice of vim is pretty random, and perhaps one day if I become a CLI coding expert, I would try both and compare them.

As I write this blog, I really start to understand how keyboard workflow is more effective. I used to struggle with moving my cursor in vim because I really don’t remember all of those shortcuts other than hjkl (and I didn’t even use them; I used arrow keys instead), irR and wq!. After spending some time practicing those keys, now I am able to quickly move my cursor, edit multiple lines, and make quick edits, completely without touching my trackpad. This is awesome!

Another noticeable little nice thing. I found out this setup automatically adds the empty line at the end of each file for me. I guess this is a plugin or something in neovim or lazyvim, which is called something best practice. This code styling point is that small little thing which bugs me a lot when I used JetBrains IDE for my blog, especially when I used it to maintain my own theme. JetBrains IDE completely ruins those go template html files (indentation, syntax highlighting, linting etc.). I am so bored to fix those numerous errors, and most surprisingly, there is not a good way in JetBrains IDE to customise or disable some of those annoying rules. Hopefully this more customisable vim solution brings me to a better future.