NVChad - Turn Neovim Into An Awesome IDE

oh boy it has been a while since I've been this excited about a text editor Let Me Explain why for some of you new folks because the longtime Watchers of my channel know that I started learning them several years ago so that I can make more efficient edits to remote config files at my old job because when all you've got is a terminal and an SSH connection you're going to have to use some kind of CLI editor like them or Nano to get that job done but before that job I was perfectly comfortable with just gooey idees I was using Sublime Text vs code even notepad++ for making local edits to mostly Python scripts at the time on my desktop or my laptop now I wasn't completely unfamiliar with the command line editors I would sometimes use Nano when I didn't have a gooey environment for installing Arch Linux or okay let's be honest for fixing Arch Linux whenever I did something to break my gooey But as time went on and I started learning them more and more I got to a point where I was actually more efficient at editing in Vim than literally any other text editor like at this point in my life if I open up a file a notepad or some other Normie IDE I'm just going to start typing J by Instinct because of my Vim muscle memory so I decided to make Vim my full-time text editor at some point but after I left that job that sparked my Vim interest and I started learning more about software development Beyond just simple Python scripts and I started working with multiple source code files and larger projects I started to want I guess more true developer features like a linter and split views with the terminal and a file tree and so on now of course Vim is a very extensible program that you can add all of those features into yourself and you can fully customize themm to your liking but and I know this might sound strange coming from a Linux user I'm not really into racing my text editor I just don't want to put a lot of time and effort into customizing my text editor I just want to use it to edit some text and I want to use it in a way that I'm going to like I want it to you know look nice just without putting in a lot of effort into making it look nice and making it function how I want but luckily for me there are a lot of talented rers in the Foss community and they finally turned them into a fully featured IDE that I really like more specifically they changed neovim the modern Vim which you should be using anyway into an IDE that I really like by packaging together a bunch of awesome plugins and themes now like I said you could totally just build this yourself from scratch with neovim and maybe a little bit of Lua configuration and it's going to teach you a whole lot about neovim just like how installing Arch will teach you a lot about Linux but if you're like me you just want a dope IDE with minimal configuration work on your end then Envy Chad is ex exactly what you want because the only dependencies besides neovim itself for Envy Chad is nerd fonts okay so this is used for all the different uh icons and and glyphs or whatever um and of course you also need get to download and install Envy Chad but I feel like pretty much everybody has get installed right it's not really that big deal as far as dependencies go and so once you've got your git uh once you've got your nerd fonts which by the way way if you're using Arch Linux uh the jet brains mono nerd font is actually in the extra repository so getting Envy Chad up and running on Arch Linux should be a breeze in fact I wouldn't be surprised if Envy Chad is just in the Aur uh so yeah Arch users by the way as usual have it very very easy um but once you've got all those dependencies installed all you got to do is run this sweet little oneliner right here and then you know run uh neovim or actually it it already has that command included so literally just run this one liner and it's going to open up neovim and the first time that it uh opens up it's going to take a couple of seconds to configure some plugins and uh you know lazy load them and everything like that but once that finishes you'll have this you'll have this super sexy fully featured IDE now there's a few things things that you might want to change you know one of them of course is the theme to personalize your text editor without having to you know open up a configuration file and start Rising stuff all you got to do is press space plus t plus h and then it brings up this set Envy Chad theme now one thing I really like about this is notice the um the text that we have over on the right here right and notice how it updates in real time as I hover over these different um these different themes this is the same text from the file that I was just editing you know it's the first uh you know couple dozen lines or whatever A lot of the time when you're dealing with themes or whatever in in other idees they'll show you some text but it won't be your text it'll just be some random example text oftentimes not even in the same programming language that you were editing so you have no idea how the syntax highlighting is going to look in your language but no you you don't have that with Envy Chad you know you can see exactly what's going on here um so you can change to whichever theme you like personally I'm a doom Chad guy uh and speaking of the syntax highlighting EnV Chad supports many different languages like built-in there's already a bunch of different languages that it has syntax highlighting for Via treeit sitter so if you enter the command TS install info and note the capitalization of the TS in both eyes you can see all the different languages that tree sitter has support for um you can see all the ones that are installed and all the ones that are not installed it already comes you know it already ships with support for HTML CSS and Java script so this was it's just perfect for frontend devs now be being able to navigate to different files and folders from within the text editor is a big deal in fact that's one of the major things that I think separates the simple text editors like notepad from Real idees uh and there's a number of ways to browse to different files in NV Chad so space FF is going to bring up the find files menu and here you can actually just type in the name of a file that you want in your current directory mean you can also just scroll through and browse through it that way but if I type in main right I automatically it automatically finds the main. RS that's in the same uh folder as li. RS and then I can open it up that way if I do it again then I can open up uh let's try this poem. txt and uh comment below if you know know what this stuff is from I know the rations do it'll open this up again in a new buffer and let's say that you've done this several times now and you've got a whole bunch of different files that are opened up across all your buffers space f plus b is going to show you files that are open just in your buffers oh my gosh that is so cool now the way that these buffers are displayed up here at the top it might make you think that they are tabs but buffers and tabs are are two different things okay if I do a tab new boom you see we got our tabs over here now and it removes the buffer view okay so don't confuse buffers and tabs but EnV Chad makes it so much easier to navigate through your buffers because you can just do it with tab to go forward through buffers and then shift tab to go backwards through buffers this makes the buffers which are built into Vim built bu into Vim built into neovim it's it's a feature that's there but so few Vim users use it because I don't know I guess buffers are kind of hard to use by default but this makes it easier to use so it's going to increase the likelihood that you'll actually use them which is greatly going to enhance your powers as a Vim user and you can also close your buffers with space plus X Keys now if you want some finer grained file navigation control Envy Chad ships with envm tree which can be accessed with control+ n and this lets you do a lot more than just open files okay so you can uh well let's let's show it off a little bit right so you can create a new one with the a key and then down here it's going to prompt us to give it a new name so we'll just call it test. RS and you can rename existing files with the r key so so we'll just call uh test. RS we'll call it fu. RS we're getting real computer sciency with these names now and uh you can copy them to different locations with c and then p and you can also delete the files with d and then y to hit yes to delete them and uh if you ever need to go up in this directory tree here then you can just do that with the hyphen key but probably my most favorite feature of this tree thing here I don't know if it's a feature of Envy tree or if it's something that Envy Chad just added but it's the ability for you to Mark files with the m command Okay so let's say that there's a whole bunch of files in this Source directory right let's say that this wasn't just another you know thing from the Rust book right it's a real rust program we can mark it with M and then this way it's going to be so much easier if I've got like two or three dozen different rust files here for me to focus on the ones that are important right now now another feature of Envy Chad that I really like that I used to just manually Implement myself with command shortcuts back in the old days of them uh is shortcuts for Windows navigation so so in Vim like editors you can split your window vertically with VSP or you can split it horizontally with SP and to navigate through these different windows in Envy Chad they just combine the control key with the hjkl key so the same way that you navigate throughout a file in Vim is used to navigate throughout Windows and Vim by adding the control key so like control k that puts me up into this upper right hand window here contr H puts me back over here and so on so yeah this is just it makes it so much more intuitive and again it makes it for I guess the Vim uh novice right someone who's not very experienced with Vim it probably makes it more likely that they're actually going to use this um you know split window command instead of just that being another feature that they don't touch because it's too confusing or whatever uh and speaking of all these different you know confusing uh key combinations stuff like that they can be tricky to learn right like I remember when I first started learning Vim I actually printed out a Vim cheat sheet that looked kind of like this and I just you know hung it up on a wall nearby when I was working so that I could always look at it and get used to using Vim um so you might be tempted to do the same thing with NV Chad but as long as you can remember this simple key combination space c plus h then you're going to have access to the uh cheat sheet and actually let me go ahead and close some of these windows real quick okay let's try space w um control [Music] w Q okay control quit a window control w q all right so as you can see I'm still learning uh envm Chad a bit myself anyway if you're confused about some of the Envy Chad key bindings all you need to remember is space C and H and then this will give you the cheat sheet built right into your IDE so that will definitely save you a little bit of toner from having a printed out and hang it up somewhere on your wall so yeah that is envy chab and you can even extend this IDE further with some LS scripts I might make a video about that in the future once I actually find some new Lis scripts to install since I'm getting back into writing rust and neovim at the same time so I'm sure I'm going to find a cool rust plugin to add to Envy Chad and no time but I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did please leave a like on it and share it and please consider buying my merch on based. win if you want to help support my work 10% discount will be applied automatically at checkout whenever you pay in Monero XMR have a great rest of your day

Channel: Mental Outlaw

Views: 169,807

Keywords: Mental Outlaw, mental, outlaw, based.win, based, vim, neovim, nvchad, text editor, ide, best ide, best text editor linux, vim vs emacs

Id: yW3ovyQCwpw

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 18 2024