What is neovim
Neovim is a modal text editor, born as a fork of vim. A modal editor differs from the popularized modeless editor model which can be seen in apps like Window’s Notepad. Neovim has three primary modes
- NORMAL: Navigate with
hjkl, perform actions on code with the syntax<MODIFIER><ACTION><TARGET>. For example,ciwwill delete the word your cursor is on, and enter INSERT mode. - INSERT: Equivalent to modeless editing.
- VISUAL: Select text using a visual guide.
Neovim has a strong community and lots of plugins thanks to its extensibility.
I have been using Neovim for a few years now, and the experience has been mostly great. The quasi-gamification of text-editing, and its personalisation makes it such a good way to think about writing.
TJ Devries, one of the main developers of Neovim, called it a Personalized Development Environment 1.
Learning
Coming from a modeless editor can be hard to internalise how vim-like movement works. In my case, I think it took a few months of full-time use to overwrite my muscle memory.
Note
You might like vim so much it might be hard to then go back to modeless editors! I have a hard time sometimes switching to using, for example, Jupyter without vim, since I am so used to vim-motions for code editing.
- https://ofirgall.github.io/learn-nvim/chapters/00-why-should-i-learn.html
- User manual or just run
nvim +Tutor - Vim Adventures: Game to learn the basics of vim movements.
My setup
Nixvim
One caveat of the dotfile-style setup: reproducibility. I recently had to install neovim in my personal laptop after installing NixOS and had troubke setting up all the required things…
This lead me to start using nixvim, a Nix-based neovim configuration system. Currently trying to improve my setup to make it reproducible and more modular, you can read about the efforts in nixvim.
My current best attempt at making a neovim setuo that is easily reproducible and portable is in my personal repo. As long as the system I’m working on has Nix, I should be able to run
nix run github:AlejandroGomezFrieiro/nixvim_config
to get myself into a neovim terminal. Of course this is not ideal, so I also setup two template flakes that use this neovim for rust and python development.
This quartz repo is also using the current versiĂłn of the nixvim configuration in the flake.nix available in the main folder of the repo.