I Love Neovim, but I NEVER Use It for Coding.

I love them I think Vim is the goat text editor but I actually have a confession to make now if you've seen my videos on Vim before you might think that I use a Vim for everything but if I'm working on some big coding project I actually never use Vim now don't get me wrong I use Vim all the time to make some quick changes like if I want to go into my CSS and change something here of course I will use Vim but if I'm starting a new project or sitting down for hours to work on something big I'm always going to be using vs codium of course I'm using the free and open source software version of vs code I'm not using the proprietary version but for big projects with tons of different files I'm always using this for my coding now I know I'm such a hypocrite and I've even got in common saying no I can't believe you're using vs code chosen one but you might be wondering why I'm using vs codium because after all you've probably seen some videos where people completely race their new Vim to look exactly like vs code and they get all of the features all of the syntax highlighting all of the autocomplete and all of the cool features that vs code has I've even done videos in the past explaining how you can get some of the best vs code features inside neovim and the thing is if you install a million plugins and do a whole bunch of configuration you can get a version of neovim that is very similar to vs code I've even done it in the past but even after doing that after installing a whole bunch of plugins and configuring my new of them I still stick with vs kodia most of the time and in this video I kind of want to explain why so first things first if you want neovim to function in any way similar to vs code you are going to have to do a lot of setup now maybe you've seen these kind of pre-built neovim distributions where you can install one package and it includes all of these plugins and things all of these plugins and configurations out of the box so you don't need to do any setup now I have tried these before you might have heard of some of the popular ones like Astro nvim or nvim Chad and these will do all of the setup work for you so you don't have to install a million plugins but whenever you use one of these pre-built neovim distributions it's not really the best experience because they're set up to somebody else's tastes like they have all of the keyboard shortcuts that somebody else has made and if you want to really customize it and configure it to be your own thing it's going to also take a lot of work and they can also be just as fragile as adding all of the plugins yourself and speaking of plugins I've been talking a lot about plugins but let me just show you what I'm talking about when I'm talking about all these plugins so these are all of the plugins that I have installed and whenever you want it to look like vs code it's generally going to be a lot of different plugins in order to achieve this these are all of the plugins I use and this is just replicating a fraction of what vs code can do now the problem is with all of these plugins it's going to start to be a little bit fragile so let me just update this and every time I would update all of my plugins it would be a little bit scary because I wouldn't know if it would break something sometimes a new update can introduce some new bugs and I will have to go and fix some issues and I can respect people who have these absolutely massive neovim configurations and they bring in even more plugins than me but it started to get to the point where I was feeling like this is not what Vim was meant to be Vim was always supposed to be this kind of lightweight text editor and just bloating it up with a million and one plugins kind of went against the spirit at least in my opinion because like I said it does become more buggy and fragile sometimes neovim would even just crash on me for whatever reason which didn't happen before I installed all of these plugins and the more plugins you add the more bloated and slow it becomes I mean it's still lightweight compared to something like vs code but after you add enough plugins to neovim it definitely becomes a lot slower than the original version with no plugins and sometimes you can start up neovim and just have it hang for a few seconds before it actually starts up that ends up happening to me a lot after I add a whole bunch of these plugins and at least in my opinion it was just starting to feel like the wrong tool for the job not to mention if you're doing anything for the web any kind of web development all of the tooling is built for vs code first and Vim second and that's even if Vim gets some of the tooling at all because most web developers are using visual studio code and so all of the extensions and things like maybe a new framework comes out like Astro it's always going to be available for vs code first because that's what these companies build their extensions for and there are some things that just work better in vs code like typescript is one of the most commonly cited examples of something that just works better better in vs code so if you're working with typescript then vs code can do a lot more for you than neovim I'm talking about autocomplete and just a lot of features that make it a lot nicer to work with it's unfortunate but the tooling is still better in vs code it gets to the point where neovim starts to feel like a second class editor because it is always getting the leftovers pretty much and all of these official packages like this was built by Astro by the official Astro team this extension for vs code and it was only ported to neovim as an afterthought by some community members and another thing is just that vs code has all of these things out of the box it has a whole bunch of nice useful features all of the syntax highlighting all of these language servers out of the box you don't have to configure everything and for everything that you can do in vs code there is usually a way to do it in neovim but it generally requires a lot of configuration and setup in order to actually get it working and it got to the point where I was just wondering is it even worth it or not like I understand that people want to perfectly configure their neovim exactly how they want it to be any of them really gives you that kind of customizability that vs code doesn't I understand the sentiment because that's why I use Linux over Windows that's why I learned the Vim bindings at first when you use something like Linux it takes a long time to set up and configure but you kind of reap the rewards after that because you save a lot of time and headaches using Linux as opposed to something like Windows but for me I never got that feeling when I was using neovim so I would spend a long time configuring this and setting everything up to how I wanted it to be but it was just never quite as good as how I had an in vs code and I understand that vs code is a lot more bloated than neovim it's written in electron which a lot of people hate and especially if you have an older laptop I can definitely understand why a lot of people would be using neovim over vs code is just going to be faster most of the time but at least for me vs code still runs fine on my computer my computer is not that ancient it's a few years old but it can still run vs code just fine so for me I never got that feeling where working with things in neovim is so much better than vs code like some people report and of course if you don't mind doing some extra work fixing things in neovim and doing a whole bunch of manual configuration then neovim will probably still be better for you but at least for me whenever I open up my code editor I want to just work I don't want to have to fix some error that was just recently introduced with a plug-in update so over the years I would just use vs code more and more until I found myself not really using neovim for much more than just some small tweaks and changes and I'm sure there's going to be somebody in the comment section saying that if I configured neovim correctly then I wouldn't be having these issues but in my opinion it just wasn't worth all of the effort now that's not to say that I don't use the Vim key bindings of course I use the vimkey bindings inside vs code if you go down here I have vs code neovim plug-in of course you should be using the vs code neovim extension and not the Vim emulation plug-in that they also have because that is just a buggy mess this works so much better because it actually integrates new Bim inside your editor so basically this right here is a neovim window right here and I can just move around this like I would a normal neovim window but of course I also get all of the features of vs code on top of it so of course I will never betray my Vim Roots by not using the actual key Bindings that would be ridiculous but as for the actual editor I still prefer to use vs codium now of course you're welcome to use whatever you want I just wanted to offer a different perspective from all of the Vim purists because some purists will say that you have to use vim and new of him for absolutely everything and if you use something like this then you're betraying the spirit of Vim I don't believe any of that and I think that you can use whatever you want as long as it makes you more productive so I wanted to say that if you love Vim but you don't necessarily love the experience of editing in Vim then that's totally fine use whatever tools you want just please don't call me a soy Dev in the comments okay that would make me really sad

Channel: Eric Murphy

Views: 24,897

Keywords: neovim, nvim, vim, vscode, vs code, vscodium, ide, best text editor, text editor, code editor, neovim vs vscode, vscode vs vim, visual studio code, coding, programming, javascript, js, html, css, react, reactjs, web development, webdev, web design, vuejs, angular, svelte, solidjs, typescript, pde, plugins, neovim plugins, vim plugins, make vim like vscode, neovim as an ide, nvchad, astro nvim

Id: GRxmJ7pNsVI

Length: 8min 52sec (532 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2023