I used to be like Jarvis here, but I’m a convert. I actually was tired of using my mouse all the time, so one day while writing up some docs, I decided to give Vim a try.
Honestly, I hate to say it but, I can’t go back. It’s so nice to be able to do so much from the keyboard alone.
Last night Spotify decided to dredge up “November Rain” by GnR and I realized that I still have neurons devoted to a perfect memory of the lead flute part of a rock power ballad that I listen to once every 5 years. I don’t even play the flute.
And that flute part is the reason I’ve never quite gotten the hang of buffers in Vim.
Just throw out your name. You never call yourself by it, and they have these nifty little cards they give you to remind you of who you are and what you look like!
The only thing better than vim keybindings for programming is vim keybindings for org mode (I know neovim has some org mode stuff but it isn’t the same as full blown org mode in emacs).
This is why I don’t use vim. Can’t spend all that mental energy on keybindings when I could spend it far more productively on KDE configuration options.
You could either spend hundreds of hours being a slower programmer in order to learn something that squeezes a diminishing returns save on time. Or you can be a fast programmer now, albeit marginally slower than one that knows vim.
Any amount of time I’ve saved using neovim has easily been offset by the amount of time I’ve spent configuring it. Wouldn’t change it though. It’s just fun to use, and there’s something nice about using an editor that I configured from the ground up. You can also just use a neovim distribution if you don’t care to set it up yourself.
The keybindings aren’t hard though, and I would say that learning vim keybindings has had a net positive impact on my efficiency overall. They become second nature more quickly than you would think. Most actions are muscle memory at this point. Maybe a week of frustration, then you’ll be back up to speed. Then you get faster and more fluid from there.
Maybe I’m just lazy, I’ve only invested 10-15 hours total into my config.
Once I got it working, I’ve never bothered to really even touch it. (I probably should, it’s most likely months of out of date…just like my NixOS config…)
Next time I make changes will probably be when I update to 0.10 for inlay hints and set that up along with attempting to fix that error message that randomly pops up every time I start Neovim.
Also probably not the typical Neovim config experience, but I’ve configured it enough to get of my way, now I just want to write code.
What do you mean spend mental energy on keybindings? Sure it will take you a couple times to do them to remenber them but after that you will just know them without having to think about them.
I don’t know if it took me more than a couple hours to learn enough keybindings to be more productive than in vscode, and later on I just learned more as I need them and am now able to use them without thinking about it.
I used to spend more time searching for the button to click with a mouse and remembering in what menu it was than it took me to learn and use vim keybindings.
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