Started learning vim and used neovim since pre-lsp era (i think before 0.5). Drew’s books are eyes opening and I never had to struggle like the writer.
Then neovim with lua support came out. I dragged my feets to migrate my nvim.init to init.lua.
Tried a few time but never completed the migration. I completed the migration using the LazyVim (like the community aspect of astrovim).
Well I was spending too much time with configuration, and (this is the main reason I guess) configuration was very often broken, because plugins have changed too often, so I was continuously fixing the plugins, which was time-consuming and annoying. To be fair that was when lua support slowly stabilized, I think the situation got a little bit better, but even more so for helix (I’m using helix now for 2 years I think).
And also helix is fast, very fast (this was also a reason: instant feedback), you really feel, that everything there is done in the core implementation (no plugin system yet unfortunately, but I have almost everything I need currently with helix, unlimited undo + persistent session would be cool, but otherwise I’m happy).
Also after using it a little bit more, the kakoune inspired visual/selection first makes more sense IMO, it’s feels more intuitive (“darn, I miscalculated 3fs, so I’ll just press v and go to the next s manually”, or multiple cursors as selections, you see exactly what you’re doing, no cgn or stuff like that)
I tend to recommend people use the vim plugin for whatever editor or IDE they currently use, with a key combo to enable and disable it. That way there are no big surprises and it still works the way you’re used to - Just with different keyboard controls. And if there’s something you can’t figure out an easy way to do with vim, write down a note somewhere of that thing to research how to do that later.
I’ve used nvim as my primary IDE for almost a year at this point and it has revolutionized my workflows in such a crazy way. It feels like I’m editing code at the speed of thought, with the combination of text objects and vim-surround
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