Im considering spending some serious time learning one of the above. Two principle engineers I work with exclusively use them, and watching them work is incredible, the speed they move and get things done is pure wizadry. Can anyone learn this skill? For what it’s worth, the alternative is learning VScode. I’ve exclusive used Android Studio in my career.
Definitely. vim is hard to get used to, but after you do, it’s damn powerful especially with plugins. Always nice to be able to do typing and coding entirely on the keyboard and not needing to move your hands to the mouse for something. Also, if you do any Linux cli stuff, you almost always have access to vi at LEAST. So being familiar with the tool she the gui and something like nano isn’t available, is invaluable.
:wq
Learn vim and use it in vscode, kinda gives you the best of both worlds
Vim is great because you can enable the bindings in nearly every editor.
I think anyone who does programming should at least give Neovim a good shot. Like, dedicate a few months to get a feel for the basic controls, use relative line numbers to jump to lines, f and F to jump to spots in lines, ciw ci" etc. to change stuff. If it’s not your thing then fine, but learning Neovim is like switching from clicking file -> save to ctrl+s, but with everything.
You really don’t need a mouse at all and in the end you’ll get to make changes as fast as you can think. It’s a language you speak through your keyboard to your editor and things just happen once you get fluent.
This thread stopped federating for some reason so I’ll reply to myself:
How different is neo vim from regular vim?
Functionally it’s pretty much identical. For the user the difference is in the added features and development model. Neovim’s development model is not centralized to one person and makes real progress. Vim on the other hand is much more a pet project of its creator and seems to get new features only if it starts losing users over to Neovim. Using Vim you’re always going to be behind the curve and under the whims of Bram’s decisions. Neovim integrated Lua as a first-class language for configuration and it was then that Bram had to do something about vimscript, but opted instead to create a new, backwards incompatible version of vimscript, another bespoke language. I very much advocate making Neovim the norm instead.
Neovim is a rewrite of the vim project. From a high level (or from the perspective of a beginner to both), there’s not much difference between the two. That is, basic usage will be the same regardless of which ones you choose. Like, the model philosophy and default key bindings are basically identical.
You start seeing major differences with more advanced usage and under the hood.
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Neovim is built to support async processing, while Vim is entirely synchronous
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Neovim offers native Language Server support while Vim requires plugins to do so. (Language Server Protocol is part of what makes VSCode so powerful)
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Vim plugins are written with a custom script called “vimscript” while Neovim plugins are written in Lua but also supports vimscript.
There are more differences, but this should cover the basic differences. I haven’t used neovim in an age, so I’m up for any corrections if anyone has any
Yes, for me the happy medium is to learn and use Vim emulation within your IDE of choice. Purists will object that Vim emulators offer inconsistent levels of support, but in my experience they all offer support for the core functionality plus varying extras. For those who already have Vim fully configured for their workflow and preferences, there is no substitute. But for anyone else, Vim emulation in an IDE is a great way to level up your text editing powers.
