NVChad - Turn Neovim Into An Awesome IDE 

As a sysadmin, I’ve worked hard to learn the shortcuts of my text editor and improve my efficiency. I doubt you can find another sysadmin as fast as I am with my preferred editor, GNU Nano.

My name is Chad and I live in Nevada, so this title freaked me out at a glance.

Gotta love the pixel misalignment on the statusbar thanks to Alacritty

I used to like and be interested in pre-made configurations for things like Neovim and Emacs (e.g. Doom Emacs, and Lazy Vim). But after using them for a bit, I felt like it was more of a hassle than it's worth, so I went back to using my own simple configurations. It may not be like this for everyone, but it's like this for me. I like things to be simple, and not bloated with things I don't care about. Also, I often find that those pre-made configurations are made for someone else and not for me, so it's more like I'm forcing myself to do it someone elses way instead of making it work for my needs. Currently my Neovim config is some custom keybinds. Some various plugins through packer (e.g. treesitter, lsp-zero, harpoon, toggleterm, and lualine). And a gruvbox theme (I tend to change my theme every now and then, but this is the one I'm currently using.) (there are some other stuff in there but that's mostly configuring the plugins, and some vim settings)

Thanks for the video! I recently discovered NvChad and I was pleasantly surprised to see this vid! I'm under the process of leaving IntelliJ completely for Neovim instead.

Love NVim! Excited already and 5 secs in!!! 🎉

You uploaded this at a perfect time because I was going to try out lazyvim yesterday

Using this for years. Fantastic, well maintained project

I heard about nvchad when I was learning rust. Great IDE. I was able to bring most features but it takes work to make it fully integrated

Great timing! I just started to try Vim and Fireship led me to NVChad, which led me here.

I took Luke Smith's config about 3 years ago and have been changing things in it slowly over time to suit my current workflow. I think this could be good for someone starting out, but it really doesn't have any killer features that would make me want to switch to it.

Thanks to you I am motivated to dive a little deeper into nvchad. I think I will use it from time to time at work. 👍

i love the flexibility that comes with customizability and extensions but dislike configuration! this is perfect

Keep making videos like this; it is good to see how someone else is leaning neovim and understand the others pain.

I actually just switched from vim to nvim with NvChad last week. It's really nice and speeds up the work flow

lots of people are validly suggesting avoiding large vim distros, a nice alternative to that would be nvim kickstart which gets just enough to get going while keeping everything vanilla nvim

Throw rotten tomatoes at me, but if I want to have a fancy editor on a remove server, I mount it using SSHFS to make it as though the files are on my local machine and then edit them in the normie GUI editors. I don't know if nvim has multiline editing where I can create an arbitrary number of selection regions using RegEx, but this feature has me absolutely hooked in Sublime Text/VS Codium. I can work on thousand-line files, find little mistakes, compare files, merge columns, find inconsistencies, I never even use spreadsheets.

Please make more videos like this your videos are always the most clear and concie without even trying you are a natural expert tutorial maker..... its not even close to being your main content yet you excel and exceed your peers . Ill be buying from your store for sure to show my appreciation for the great content (which i never do ) please make more instructional and informative content on useful tools. i managed to use multiple career changing technologies through your channel and for that i am thankful. plus i am always getting a dose of updates and entertainment when it comes to CS and security content.

I was not expecting Mental Outlaw and NvChad in the same video. A surprise, but a nice one. ^ ^

This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks! Just an fyi to someone trying to use thus via ssh on windows, don't forget to set your PowerShell/CMD font.

Thanks for this, I use neovim for all of my development as a DevOps engineer. I cant wait to use this

Really Thx a lots, start using neovim at the past, it is really tough and install every things and not easily , also, Nvchad makes the nvim much more like the modern editor

I think the main thing that makes neovim feel like an ide is the lsp capabilities and autocompletion which are handled by plugins like lspconfig and nvim-coc. I really wish there was a debug protocol baked into neovim the same way lsp currently is.

As a daily nvchad user, this vid was helpful. Find buffer and split window is not something I use normally, plus didn't know the difference between tabs and buffers.

I am hyped :) I actually use vim with termux on android and I think it will reduce my pain.

This video came up to me just as I was about to work on my code project, thanks so much. Also, what programming languages do you use?

Cool. I just made the jump from nano to neovim and am slowly getting a feel for it. I like it a lot. I may have to print out a cheat sheet for my desk 😅.

I've been using vscode because I just couldn't be bothered to configure vim myself but now I'll install it for sure

I have worked with Astrovim for a long time and found it ok. At the same time, I found it was always too overloaded for me, for example using two packet managers at the same time and including some extensions that I never used. NVChad looks more lightweight. I like that.

I've been using this since starting my journey into Arch Linux and absolutely loving it. It's like the perfect fusion of quick text editor and full ide with so much QoL

installed nvchad today using this vid. thanx kenny

roll your own config! it may take a little bit longer to figure out, but it will make you much more familiar with neovim and make changing things much more simple. nvchad is pretty difficult to customize with custom plugins or changing the default behavior. p.s. if you're going to use a pre-made config, lazyvim is much better imo. much simpler to configure and doesn't lock you in to using specific settings that you might not like

Been using neovim at work (programmer) for two years now. Best switch I've made in my career

NVChad is awesome! It's my code editor of choice as a CS student

I'm gonna give this a try. I switched to vim a few months ago, but I'm still not REALLY good with vim shortcuts. Thanks.

Looks great! thank you for the share

NvChad is great but I personally use another neovim config called AstroNvim - it feels a kinda easier to use out of the box and it suits my needs

Hi Mental, How is your RockPro doing so far and does the tor relay's work on them? Greetings and keep up the nice videos!

let's go! I've been daily driving this version a year

Started using VIM after 4 years of sublime text... instantly fell in love; but I will never forget sublime, he teached me to code

Thank you so much. That's all I really really need.

2:21 i can agree to that as i too dont wanna pointlessly spend hours ricing my system or terminal just to make them look better and rather wanna spend that valuable amount of time working on a project or learning something

NvChad is great, been using it for half a year now. It's a bit sad to sometimes return to my old incomplete rice of vim though lol Didn't know many of these hotkeys though! Small tip: you can exit screens created by split with plain :q, it won't close the whole vim until there's one screen left

Glad to see you've been following the Rust book

Great Video Thanks. Made me re try vim :P I just have to get all the config up and running again...

Thank you so much! I'm too lazy to learn these shortcuts myself XD

ctrl o or ctrl i is nav forward or backward in jumps, this is really useful when you edit more then 1 file, ex. you forgot what a function is doing, so you use gd to goto def. and you can read the code and to get back you ctrl o and you back to your code.

Holy book of rust enjoyer, very cool Jason Tatum. Personally I like lunarvim

I tried nvchad, and then astro, and settled on astro. I haven't needed to customise it very much, just added some community language meta-packages really. Which-key is the best.

every time i watch a video about this config i learn something new lol

I find it a little funny that so many nvim plugins seems to do exactly the same as a feature which already is built in but just with a little better UI :D

Hey Kenny, thanks for the video

LazyVim is the perfect distro because it's still very much a vanilla install in a way. I feel like NVChad becomes another beast, so if you're not that savvy programming-wise, it might be difficult do deal with extensions. I feel like for a noob like myself, I get a lot more useful (and easier) information out there for solving LazyVim than I get for NVChad.

I picked up you saying GUI first as gooey :D

default emacs with the whiteboard theme seems to be all i need

What I have issues with is getting vimtex and githubs copilot integrated. Specifically, vimtex compilation works only if I open neovim through the terminal, not, for example, if I open a tex file through lf or Nemo. I don't know why, it honestly does not bother me enough to bother with it, but if someone knows, please let me know.

Can somebody please help me how to chnage the behaviour of the cursor, to restore it after exiting neovim? I have configure my cursor to blinking line, and when I exit neovim, it stays solid, non-blinking block. On the web there are many question like that, and many solutions, but either I don't know where to apply them, or when I found out where to apply them - they doesn't work.

I really like helix, it has similar keybindings and treesitter lsp etc is already included

the creator of Nvchad is a gigachad 🔥

VIM ON TOP

Ok now i convinced, give it a try

Lets go!!

love it bro

Would you consider making a video going into more details about getting LSP's installed

Switched to vim pretty quick as a sysad after feeling silly for pulling nano in front of my manager to write various scripts with hundreds of lines or configs that span more than a page. He wasn't bothered at all but I felt like I came straight out of super weenies hut jr. I've been driving nvchad since and compared to engineers who use their own vim config (trouble with LSP and making it work like an ide) or vscode (it eats 32gb of ram and makes their i7/r9 workstations sweat) it's super comfy and efficient. And looks better.

i personally prefer lunarvim, but nvchad is cool too :D

did you forgot to TSInstall rust? it installs rust treesitter parser which is needed for treesitter syntax highlighting

I initially installed NvChad as well, but then after watching The Primeagen i felt ashamed and installed Neovim kickstart of TJ and configured that to be like NvChad (manually added file tree, buffers,..etc). Did this to call myself pure Neovim user lol.

+1 to printing cheatsheets. I also had one for tmux

vim is truly incredible

Irony is coming here and knowing it's a vim related video and you just want to watch it (Perhaps to finally convert a friend) Peak reality though? That's coming here to watch for vim, and by the second or third time seeing the Rust code in front of me, realizing it's something I was attempting to implement while learning Rust. That, that's a subscription.

Could you make a video about how to set up nvim for Python?

I installed nvchad once without knowing what it was. it put a little red arrow next to the numberline, and I spent an hour trying to figure out what that red arrow was before I gave up and uninstalled. I just want rust errors to end up in a quickfix list (or whatever) and I have had no luck

I noticed you accept XMR. Awesome! Everybody in the world needs to use it! NvChad is poorly documented. The themes, th, suck. I've gone through all of them over-and-over-and-over but none work for me. The current line and the comments are almost invisible to my eyes. I've had to make some special colors. They need to quit coming out with so many themes and start making some good ones. Quality beats volume. The telegram help channel for NvChad is, well, unhelpful. Normal vi is good enough for me. Vim is overkill. Neovim in today's world is the default. NvChad is the kitchen sink. I told myself I'd try NvChad and if it slowed things down I'd choose something else. Surprisingly this kitchen sink is performant. No slowdowns to stop the show. Overall it was a great video.

5:50 yoo a fellow minigrep developer! Was just doing that same chapter the other day

NvChad showed me what was possible with Neovim. The problem is I'm not a fan of the folder structure. So I wrote my own config from scratch that does everything NvChad can do and more 😎

Based af

Best way I found to close those VSP and SP is (SPACE + X). Im still a little confused as to closing terminals.. But that also works with SPACE + X. You just need to not be in the Terminal I mode

we all know he recommended it because it has chad in the name.

Im new to neovim, so please excuse me if my question is dumb, but how can I format my code like I can do in vscode with prettier?

This seems l8ke it's a meme but it also isn't which makes it more of a meme. Good job

all 4 nvim distros are great but there an setepping stone for you to create your own config based on kickstart or just start from bare nothing

Same, remote with Tmux and Vim... Back in the day... Felt 1337

Disclaimer!!! Only use something like nvchad and other neovim distro if you have experience in configuring neovim with lua. These distro do come with setup but if you want to extend it to use other languages then you will have to configure no matter what.

perfect timing

What are the best resources to learn vim motions? I keep meaning to get better at vi but I get lazy and give up, I think I need a spoonfed course or set drills to practice.

I used nvchad for some time but the way that configuration is handled is very different than regular neovim configuration, it is very confusing. So i gave up and started using lazyvim, configuration is simple and well documented

"Okay, let's be honest - for FIXING archlinux whenever I broke the GUI" Damn felt that 😅

Ok nvim get another chance now, thanks!

How does it compare to astronvim?

i guess this is how god felt when he gave fire to man. casually gods giving mortals power that far exceed. truly a chad of all times

Think I will stick to Helix and then VSCode when the projects get too large for the telescope file browser

So that makes it EmChad instead of doomemacs. Or is this doomvim?

i like the traditional vim / vi editor. nvim is just vscode without mouse

Is there support for liveshare or an alternative?

Today was the day that I officially switched from Vim to NeoVim, I gonna miss you, Vim 😢

Status Line problem: tried using the Nerd Font but the icons just won't show.

Nice!

How do you vertical split without showing the horizontal navbar???

So it's basically visual studio code, but for terminal?