I had to SSH into a server for dev work at a previous job. And vim was the obvious best answer for “IDE like” experience in a terminal. I needed more power than nano.
And then vim stalled in development. Neovim was created in response to that, and it had new shiny features (many of which vim also has now), that caught my eye (async tasks were added to neovim before vim).
So I was a vim user out of necessity and I switched to neovim to chase new shiny things, and have found 0 reason to go back.
Been using some sort of vi for 20-some years now and I’m still not convinced. I suspect it’s got something to do with my configuration. I’ll need to tinker a bit. I think I’ll give it another 20 years then I’ll let you know.
Ever since I learned about Vim it was something I wanted to learn but always feared the adjustment period and unwarranted words of caution from internet strangers.
I had learned i3 already and was focusing on keeping my hands on the keyboard for longer. I had a 2 week phase of watching the Primeagon and watching him use Neovim made me feel thoroughly embarrassed about how I wrote code. I already was sold on the logic, so seeing the benefits with my own eyes pushed me over the edge.
I got kickstarter working and after about 3 days of having vscode and neovim open next to each other, I found I was starting to move faster in neovim than vscode.
Now I have the confidence to open vi on a prod server and make changes. This new ability justified my desire to finally go for a programmable keyboard and now it’s very rare I touch my mouse at all.
I don’t use it as much because my day-to-day is RStudio and Libre Office, but whenever I edit .nix files, I do it with Neovim. What convinced me was the internet’s lauding of Vim and reading about Lua and other quality of life improvements in Neovim. What convinced me was how easy it is to install and use for my minimal use case.
I don’t think I had an evaluation period beyond using interactive Vim tutorials until I felt comfortable with it.
hassle-free copy/paste on wayland was my first reason to switch from vim to neovim. nvchad second
