How to ACTUALLY switch from VS Code to Neovim 

I can give you my reasoning. Currently I am in transition period for the last month, still have not work out how to debug yet. But I spend most of my time in k8s clusters and there is the k9s tui that is fantastic for explore cluster and doing that debug work. k9s is always opened in a terminal. For the terminal emulator I use kitty which has great support of panes and tabs, with very fast switching between tabs. So now I can have code editor (neovim) in one tab and k9s in second tab, plus a random tab for watches or running kudectl commands. k9s also use mostly the same keybindings as vim. I still love the jet brains products. They are so good but for what I am doing the more time can have window focus on kitty the faster I can move. If I was doing web dev where there would be the constant switch to a web browser, I am not sure I would put the effort in.

Not pinning this to be an ass, but thought it might actually be useful for the people who like vim to share their "why" in this thread. Here is some of the reasons I like vim from another comment thread: "If I had to sum up my key reasons for preferring neovim, it's that I have a super lightweight coding environment that I can instantly pop up (I just hit Ctrl + J and I instantly get my terminal full screen) - I can very quickly jump between different projects without having to have say 4 different instances of my IDE open, I find coding with vim bindings and my own personal keymaps to be far more quick/satisfying/ergonomic, I can use all of my editors features/gizmos completely through the keyboard without ever having to touch the mouse, and I have a high degree of control over tailoring the editor to my own workflow. But, there is also this secondary benefit I think where because neovim forces you deeper into this configuration sort of environment (a downside), this same thing also leads to increased skills with languages and tools I wouldn't otherwise be using (i.e. lua and things like sed/grep)"

For me it’s the latency, and the way you can type command a ahead of the UI without it messing up. You can type as fast as your fingers, not as fast as a UI can update. I describe it like when I was younger, I played fps games all the time. I would experiment with turning my sensitivity up slowly and after a while I could whip around a corner and get a kill way faster than the other guy. The speed of feedback gave room for muscle memory to develop and it was really fun. In vim/neovim, things can become muscle memory in ways that are hard with vscode, so once you develop that muscle memory, you really don’t have to think much. It just makes it easier for me to get into a flow state, which brings back a lot of the joy from when I first was learning to code. In short, I think vim/neovim makes coding more fun for me. It took a while to develop the skills to enjoy but I’m sure glad I did it. If you haven’t given it a shot I can’t recommend it highly enough, maybe you’ll start to have more fun programming too. And if not, hey ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that’s ok too. At least you gave it a try and expanded your horizons a bit

Everyone's more or less in a different situation, but I totally agree with the lightweighted coding environment point of view. I am working on a more-than-10-year-old machine and had a hard time using the default IDE which could causes the machine frozen now and then. Also I need to connect to the cloud from time to time in terminal so vim is more or less encoded in my DNA. The day I knew neovim, it conpletely changed my mindset. Now I use neovim with tmux in an ssh to another new machine. Sounds absurd but it actually works perfectly. Well, another point but equally important is that it feels soooo sexy when you can change something with only several strokes while the others need more than 1 min. Feels soooo good to get completely rid of the mouse while coding. Even my seniors now have no idea what I have just done and I would say I am just getting started. It's not only about productivity, but about how enjoyable it is to learn the optimization neovim provides and make use of it. Certainly worth trying it.

Also vim and vim motions are just fun and if you really master even the basics, you feel like a god. When your muscle memory just kicks in, you do a fast ci( and your coworker sitting next to you just thinks "what the hell just happend". But honestly vim can just be fun and satisfying, once you get used to it. But the downside to using vimmotions on a daily basis is that you now feel awkward in every none vim text box, like in browsers or chats and you suddently just post a :wq somewhere out of habit

WSL???? I feel sorry for you my brother

@@jamess.2491 yup, WSL. Setting it up wasn't so bad, it wasn't nearly as time consuming as actually messing with lua files for nvim. I originally tried to use virtualbox, but it was too slow and inconvenient.

why would you need containerization with docker for this? can you explain how you ended up needed that?

for what reasons are you a better programmer?

I'm trying to learn neovim but sometimes it is so fricking hard ngl hahaha.

m a learner now but yeah i can see how difficult is to manage vim or nvim plugins but if you understand core principle it so easy now i am using lazy.nvim, is awesome but i am trying to install everything form scratch is quite confusing and i mean it eats time..... but the satisfaction i get after is worth it.. hah haha

especially considering the new vscode profiles. Now I can have multiple profiles with different extensions installed for different environments

Would say if you use lazyvim you won't have nearly the hazzle..once you figured out how they do it. Being able to script your editor on the fly is just awesome..though you can probably do that in vscode also I guess.

I just use whatever the default is for gruvbox, you can check out my config here if you like: github.com/joshuamorony/nvim

That sounds like so much fun, reminds me of my Commodore 64 days!

Hey this is just from having the Angular Language Service installed (you can see my lsp config here: github.com/joshuamorony/nvim/blob/9d3a53455a8d938e24c9341a7ca0d9dad6bf4424/after/plugin/lsp.lua#L10)

I'm using MesloLGS NF

Well, did you?

That’s crazy pace

@@fichtensaft5149 yeah though I still do web development in VS code but I use VIm extension ( and NVIM for everything else , especially code review )

WSL2 automatically forwards ports with listeners attached inside the Linux environment so they can be accessed on your windows localhost

I think the problem is vim is single threaded so it can lag when waiting for LSP response.

​​@@Boxing_Gamer incorrect. It is not single threaded.

​@@bestiebootsfrom what I can read it uses an event loop..similar to node js.

Is phind just chatgpt repackaged?

Such a good feeling when you can finally ditch vscode! 🙌 I did the same about a year ago, and it just keeps getting more fun as I figure out new ways to optimize my workflow

@@KadenCartwright tbh I settled well with a "neovim distro" because I wanted to have a more familiar interface, since I couldn't really slow down my tasks while switching to nvim. Astro was the one that fit me the best, but I'll eventually try my hand at configuring a setup with absolutely only the stuff I need.

Mason is incredible

I just added a link to the description

The bad thing its behind a paywall

No, just do whatever you want to do. If you don't see worth in doing it, and can already use the bindings comfortably then you're good. Beyond that is just philosophy and being able to say you built your IDE. For some people, me, that's enough to do it, if not don't. Ps: if you're asking to be convinced that means you might already be the type of person that wants that, but just don't want to go through the hassle. Just do what he said build your vim on the side (or use stuff like LazyVim) and then see if it's for you.

I would never leave Webstorm. Not just the editor, but the assist it provides is unmatched - true for any JetBrain editors.

Yes it is very painful lol, but I do like for a quick terminal edit instead of loading up webstorm for a single page. I use webstorm for full development but neovim for a quick in and out file edit

Use learn vim motions. That's 80% of the pain. After that you can tweak your config to be exactly how you like them. Vims LSP and code action support is amazing. Snippets are available for any language you'd ever want. Neovim is the best editor because it is the most configurable editor. If you're that locked into one text editor you should ask yourself how much reliance are you putting on that tool to be productive? Are you locking yourself into an ecosystem that is difficult to escape? Is it going to make it difficult to adapt to new technologies in the future? With neovim you don't have to worry about it because it's all based upon plugins where with webstorm or any other none text editor IDE you're locking yourself into one specific workflow.

Ideavim?

@@adrian_franczak ideavim is just amazing… being able to combine vim motions and remapping even IntelliJ commands is priceless.

Don’t get discouraged, it’s super worth the effort!

Buying a course sounds silly to me, there's a lot of material online for free. Should've donated to the maintainers instead.

@@nullptr. It was like 5$ on udemy, it was pretty darn good, they guy focused more on stock vim, motions and keybindings and not the usual plugin this, distro that. I have had ass luck with finding good documentation or free videos for that matter, I think that the search time is better spent actually practicing.

Depends what you want, but for me the other big reason I like using neovim is specifically that it is terminal based and with tmux/zoxide allows for a workflow like I show in this section of my other video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-P5QPacz2-ao.htmlsi=baIXEG-f0VQJ-rfK&t=155 - it's not uncommon for me to have 6+ different projects to switch between, and with this set up I can bring anything I need up almost instantaneously (and of course the memory usage is better than having 6+ instances of VSCode running) Generally I just like having as much in the terminal as I can as I find improves my workflow (not just purely for speed reasons, it also feels less frustrating to me)

Yes you can. And even more using treesitter. It's Just a matter on how much you experiment with the functionalities to find the Crazy amount of shit you can do with It that vscode can't even dream about.

I don't remember exactly - I had toyed with it from time to time so I wasn't completely fresh when trying to switch, but once I made a dedicated effort to make the switch I think it was probably around maybe 2 weeks until I was able to use neovim for all my work

If you haven't discovered til now, it's called relative line number. I don't know exactly the command to set it on, you may google it

Did you mean :set relativenumber ?

That is a screenshot from VS Code and is just the default VS Code theme

thank you @@JoshuaMorony

Well you didn't pass step 1 then ;P Not for you

If jet brains bothered to get their search and navigation features right, instead of focusing on supporting the newest javascript framework, I might give them a chance.

​@@Boxing_Gamer may you elaborate? I'm learning the searching capabilities of intellij right now and it seems ok to me

you can see my neotree config here: github.com/joshuamorony/lazyvim/blob/main/lua/plugins/neo-tree.lua (note the window position = "right" config specifically)

All good! I'm using MesloLGS NF

To be fair I haven't worked in a team environment for a long time, what sort of frictions do you think you would run into though?

​@@JoshuaMorony Same I am currently a solo developer at my organization, been in this role for the past 10 months. However, in my experience I went from everyone using their own diff editor to everyone using VSCode was really nice since we all discovered little quality of life features in the editor and shared with each other. When we would pair program for a bit or walk over and help another developer it was much easier to help each other when we were all familiar with the editor.

​@@JoshuaMorony You and your colleagues can learn from eachother more easily if you both use the same tools. Also, devcontainers and extensions for VSCode are super useful for setting up development environments for multiple team-members. But you can probably setup similiar arrangements with NeoVIM or any other IDE. A real world example, where sharing debugging know-how is made simpler by knowing my colleague is using VSCode. 1) Open it as a workspace 2) Run "Reopen in devcontainer" 3) Wait for the debug extension to load 4) Click the run button that appears above your test function I really like your suggestion for using the Vim-Extension. It's probably the sweet spot for most.

@@JoshuaMoronyI use Webstorm with vim commands and can never go back. Is nice not reaching for your mouse.

I have not found this to be an issue, despite more and more people adopting IDEs over the years. It's getting rarer to find co-workers using it or emacs, but never caused a problem. I guess lately it's started to be seen as a hipster editor, so maybe there's some reactionary stuff I haven't dealt with yet?

I disagree. LazyVim takes you to a point where you don’t really have to think about that you’re doing. It’s kind of like installing vscode and having it run out of the box. Might as well just stick with vscode. My suggestion is to mess around with your own config (building and managing one from scratch) for like a month for some hobby project. Learn how package management and lsp management works. Learn to fix problems when neovim breaks. This is important because you know how to fix something that you built and broke that her than trying to fix something someone else built. After you get some proficiency in debugging your own Neovim set up, switch to LazyVim and try to bring it to a point where it is comfortable for you.

github.com/joshuamorony/nvim

The whole point is to do it yourself, my dood

These things clicked for me more when I would think of them as what they actually are rather than some obscure looking shortcut, e.g. in my head I would say "delete-in-curly brace" which is "di{" or "delete-around-curly brace" da{, "delete-in-tag", "delete-around-paragraph", "delete-in-word" and so on

This is really helpful, thanks!@@JoshuaMorony

Zzzzz Imagine use vscodzzzzzz or intelizzzzz I use neovim btw

​@@gustavojoaquin_archimagine using neovim😂

@@nahidahmed9153 YES 🗿 I'm not a 🏳️‍🌈 ((()))))

same case

So you just switched ? Just like that ?

This is not true like at all though? Buffers in vim/nvim are almost exactly the same as tabs in vscode aside from the native way to view them is not a typical browser like tab system in vim/neovim. But this is just a UI layer thing, there are plugins that can provide that for you if you really want it

and yes, I've used vim a lot. VSC has Vim extension. A lot of the extensions are not well set up keybind wise imo, but then again, it's barely worse than in vim itself ...

I need to force using change into my brain - my muscle memory is stuck on delete -> insert (e.g. diwi instead of ciw) - not a big deal I guess!

I get that it can seem like that, and certainly there is some kind of "elite" factor around vim (e.g. the memed attitude around "I use neovim btw"). Maybe that is some people's motivation - I think it's a mistake to assume this is all just pointless elitism though - there is value here, and whether it is worth it or not is going to come down to preference. If I had to sum up my key reasons for preferring neovim, it's that I have a super lightweight coding environment that I can instantly pop up (I just hit Ctrl + J and I instantly get my terminal full screen) - I can very quickly jump between different projects without having to have say 4 different instances of my IDE open, I find coding with vim bindings and my own personal keymaps to be far more quick/satisfying/ergonomic, I can use all of my editors features/gizmos completely through the keyboard without ever having to touch the mouse, and I have a high degree of control over tailoring the editor to my own workflow. But, there is also this secondary benefit I think where because neovim forces you deeper into this configuration sort of environment (a downside), this same thing also leads to increased skills with languages and tools I wouldn't otherwise be using (i.e. lua and things like sed/grep)

@@JoshuaMorony I understand that it might feel satisfying/ergonomic/quick, but it reminds me of a meme "programmers will spend 20 hours writing a script and automating something that they could do manually in 2 hours". There is this drive in many people's brains to automate and optimise things, I get that, but it is hard for me to justify this professionally when my time is limited. How much of your work is actually writing code? I spend much more time talking to people about what we want to build, reading docs and thinking, than actually typing the code. It is not a bottleneck for me. And for example the time it will take me to select the whole function and delete it is irrelevant. I also don't see a problem with my IDE not being lightweight. I don't remember when it was the last time I noticed my editor being slow or not opening as fast as I would wish. Maybe when I was using full Visual Studio or some other garbage Codeblocks at university. It is very funny to me when some people say "I use IDE for normal projects and neovim to make quick single file edits". Why not just use a notepad in that case, instead of spending so much time learning neovim to just edit a config file. Anyway I will probably get vim motions in VS code "because I like to suffer". Great video and thanks for responding!

​@@anj000 I write a lot of code but I also I don't think you have to be pushing out lots of code for it to be worth it. The initial investment in terms of time with vim/neovim is large, but once you get things set up and are comfortable there isn't much of an ongoing time investment. So, if you're going to be coding for probably decades to come, the initial investment become negligible if it is going to pay off for you in even little ways. That is an if though - if you don't see what vim/a terminal based editor offers as being beneficial to you then it makes sense not to bother with it. A big factor for me isn't so much that vim allows me to crank out code faster, it's more so that I feel less of a barrier between what I am thinking/trying to code and actually executing it. With VS Code I generally felt more disorganised and was sort of very conscious of trying to use a tool to make the code I want happen, with neovim it feels to me like there is less of a barrier between my thoughts and the execution and everything flows much more nicely. Maybe that sounds silly, but it's the best way I can think to explain it right now.

​@@JoshuaMorony actually the explanation with the barrier between thoughts and the execution is really good. I personally don't experience so much struggle with the editor. But on the other hand maybe I just don't know the alternatives and I don't know how much better it could be. Thank you for your comments, didn't expect them to be honest :D

You talking like LSP diagnostics stuff for your projects, or like trying to fix things when Neovim just decides that today is a good day to break completely?

@@JoshuaMorony LSP works fine, its really the debug. Like, step in, step out, breakpoints, etc... I cant get DAP to work, and since I work with angular, dotnet and flutter, it seems I need to solve this 3 times. :(

@@o_glethorpe ah I'm just a console logger so I've never really run into this - it has to be a pretty bad day for me to bring our the proper debugging tools, and even then I just use the browser tools

I definitely have stockholm syndrome for this but I come to term with Using the right tool for the right job. When I need to debug, I just: open float terminal -> webstorm . 😅

You don't have to only use one editor. I code in neovim, debug in vscode.

It's like sharpen an axe, good in long term

I think you have a good question. My answer is that I need to control many computers at the same time, and I can do that through a terminal. However I missed some of the nice features of vs code. This lets me have my cake and eat it too. For me though, since I need to operate multiple machines, set up on each machine has to be quick and painless.

True, that’s why I switch back after trying it 😂

Valid one. Because you get to understand more stuff not just the things you know but you get to mess around with your computer and you learn so much stuff. Don't ask me how, I messed with OS for a few years distro hopping while I could just stick to one but I learnt so much that I don't panic when an error pops up and I'm more comfortable with making mistakes and being fluid smooth with my computer and I know a lot more that indirectly contributes to my work

to feel superior 👌

You can customize vim alot more, especially when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. But if you're happy with your current setup there's no reason to switch.

It's also much faster than VS Code

Easier than getting VS Code to have the functionality of Vim. The extention only does so much.

Vim is in a weird place where if you only ever need to do is write code, once you get proficient with it, you’ll wonder why the hell were you even bothering with with notepad style text editors. It feels like you’re actually walking compared to when you were crawling with the conventional editor. The problem with vim is that it’s extremely pathetic without addons for any modern software development. Sure you’re editing code faster than any normie, but those normies have autocomplete, multiple tabs and windows, in-line debugging, mouse over code definition peeking. You’ll feel like you’re walking, but the normies are on a sled, you’re walking barefoot and your feet hurt. The obvious next step is to start supplementing vim with plugins. Once you do that, you’re not only not crawling, but you’re basically running now. If you ever consider trying out vim, I suggest you go straight to lazy nvim. You don’t need to configure anything besides installing an LSP for your programming language of choice. I use everything default and it’s already way better than vscode in my experience.

Besides, VSCode is pretty crap without plugins either. Once you have added all the plugins you need, it’s no longer as fast as it used to be outside of the box.

You sound like you like Java 🥶

@@user-fr2fm3ri3w I agree 100% with everything he says except the last part. Usually you start coding before having a clear picture. Picture will be clearer during the process. He seems to be a very organize person, liking Java as to do with liking verbosity not organization, lol.

I feel likely to agree. Before getting my job I was super into Linux and dot files config stuff. Today I just want to seat, get my brain force explored by the company and never see the computer again til next day.