Why I prefer Neovim over VSCode

i am david your developer on ut and in this video i will show you why i prefer neovim over vs code [Music] vs code is a great text editor it introduced many useful components like for example the language server protocol which gives you a standardized way to deal with language specific features for example go to definition it does it by using a language server which is editor agnostic another useful component is the debug adapter protocol which helps you to debug your application in an editor-agnostic way vs code has a rich marketplace with many extensions which lets you tweak your editor it has support for all mainstream programming languages and you can even use vim key bindings or even embed neovim into vs code but after using vs code for more than a year i switched back to neovim and i couldn't be happier let me tell you why before i talk about the advantages of neo vim over vs code let me first show you that i'm not missing anything i can open neovim i can select my file i can use the language server which is running in the background for example to go to the definition of this function jump back i can set breakpoints i can debug my application using the debug adapter protocol i can inspect my variables and i have everything i need for my everyday programming work one major advantage of neovim is performance i can just type whatever i want without having to wait for any ui reactions the only limiting factor is my typing speed let's just say we want to open a file in this current workspace with a named test in it as you can see i could just type ahead and i didn't have to wait for any ui changes the response was immediate now let's do the same thing with vs code it's still fast but there was a noticeable delay and most importantly if i would have typed too early my keystrokes would have been lost but to be fair the biggest performance difference is only during startup as an electron app vs code consumes a lot of memory much more than neovim another advantage of neovim is that it's completely keyboard driven you don't need to use the mouse it would slow you down as an example let's just say you want to see the changed files in your git repository see the difference and stage them and commit them you can see the change you can stage it you can commit it and you're done no mouse needed now let's see how this is done in vs code first you press ctrl shift g to open the git pane then you can press enter to see the changes in the file but now you have to use your mouse to stage the file go into the commit message and write the commit message which you can finalize with command enter so you need to use the mouse here another advantage of neovim is that there is no visual clutter only the most important things are shown your code some hints from the lsp server the file path your git status and that's it you can fully concentrate on your work and if you need something you can enable it on demand like for example this terminal envious code you always have this sidebar which takes a lot of space you have buttons for example to close the file which is really not needed when you open up a terminal pane you have even more buttons and if you have multiple terminals you even have another pane so the whole ui is pretty much cluttered another disadvantage of vs code is that it kind of tries to babysit its users let's just say you want to open a new folder then your work is interrupted and this code asks you first to trust that new folder another example are pop-ups which interrupt your workflow to tell you about recommended extensions both can be disabled but it kinda tells you that vs code favors casual users over power users i hope i could show you that neovim is a powerful alternative to vs code if you prefer an efficient development environment and that it absolutely fits your needs it requires a bit of work up front but it's definitely worth it and you will learn a lot along the way i'm very grateful for vs code because it brought the language server protocol and the debug adapter protocol which ironically is the reason why i could even switch to new rim for my daily work thanks for watching and stay tuned

Channel: DevOnDuty

Views: 115,995

Keywords: neovim, vim, VSCode, Visual Studio Code, Neovim, better, IDE, programming, which is better, Comparison, Tool, Editor, Text Editor

Id: 9wsl6wvjdCg

Length: 5min 36sec (336 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021