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Why Do I use Neovim?

Have you ever wondered, why do people use Neovim, is it because all the other popular youtubers out there are usig it? What's realy happening

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By Christian Arzu
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Why Do I use Neovim?

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Why do I use Neovim?

You don’t know it yet, but after you try Neovim, you will love it. I was used to VScode, but never enjoyed it. The reason for that could be that I suck at programming, as I’m not a developer. By the way, did you ever watch the "Fun with Dick and Jane" 2005 film with Jim Carrey? I love it too. This also reminded me that a few days ago I was watching this movie I used to watch as a kid, "Dennis the Menace" from 1993, and I was having a blast. The scene with the crook is just hilarious. When I watched it as a kid, I did it from the perspective of Dennis, but this last time hit different, I was the grumpy old man, Mr. George Wilson.

With all that philosophy out of the way, let’s talk business. Why do I use Neovim? I really have to think this through and try to justify my answer. I don’t have it at the top of my mind. But I’ve forgotten how it feels to work outside Neovim. The words I’m reading right now were written a night before after my parents came to visit, they had to drive for 2 hours just to see me. My brother recently came from the US, he drives a container truck there, works more hours a day that you can imagine. Latinos man, I’m proud of him, and my other 2 brothers.

All I had to do to start writing was to leave the “r” pressed in my keyboard, that brings up the daily note, and I start writing. This is done inside Neovim.

If then I remember I have to modify kitty’s transparency as I cannot see the background image that well, I just press hyper+t+r on my keyboard. That immediately takes me to my “dotfiles” kitty session, which automatically opens Neovim in that directory, look for the file, open it, and start working on it. I use sublayers by the way, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, go and watch this video

But then I remember I had to edit the “about me” page on my blogpost, I have to update the pricing for the people that want to promote themselves in my channel. So I press hyper+t+l and takes me to that other session, which opens Neovim in that other directory, I can quickly jump to that file, edit it in less than 10 seconds. Automatically saves, bring up LazyGit from within Neovim, push the changes, and that automatically builds the site through a GitHub action. This is all done without ever leaving my terminal or switching to another app, no clicking around, no visually searching for stuff, just acting on my keyboard really fast, and a few fingertips away.

Then I’m like, alright, let’s go back to my dots, I need to push a lot of pending changes that I have not committed in days. So by leaving pressed a single key b I go back to the previous kitty session, bring up LazyGit, commit and push all my changes. It takes me just a few minutes. My chain of thought is not interrupted, I don’t lose my flow. It just naturally and gracefully follows my commands.

Then I remember. I have a video idea for tomorrow, I need to write it down before I forget. I just leave the t key pressed and this brings up yet another repo. Which I call skitty-notes and I write down the video idea, this takes me just a few seconds, and my flow is not interrupted. Then I go back to my previous session by just leaving b pressed again.

If you don’t know what the concept of the “Alternate” session, file, and app are. It just means the “previous” one. With b I go to the alternate kitty session. With leader+space I go to the alternate file within neovim, with z I go to the alternate app. With x I go to the alternate instance of the same app. The idea is to go back really fast between the last 2 things you were working on. More detailed video coming soon.

I need to write something in my daily note for today, so I’ll just leave the e key pressed to get there. I’ll write down what I need. Autocompletion will work beautifully, and if I write something incorrectly, the Harper Language Server will kick in and bitch about it. I’m writing offensive language? It will let me know, if I write Neovim with a lowercase letter? It will let me know too. How can I jump to that Harper diagnostic to fix it? [d or ]d take me there, then I just press Leader+mss to fix it.

What if I want to create a blogpost out of this video I’m reading right now? That’s a piece of cake. I bring up a snippet with ;blogposttemplate which fills out the blogpost template, copy paste the body of the article. Add a few images with some custom Neovim keymaps that automatically convert those images to the AVIF format and store them in my assets directory. And the article is up, in less than 10 minutes. What if I want to add an entire section in all the articles in my blogpost with a search and replace that runs in visual mode in less than a few seconds? I do that with a Neovim plugin called grug-far.nvim. I have a video in which I demo all this blogpost related workflow in real time. Go and check it out

Do I open a new directory but I need to create a GitHub repo from it? No problem, I have a keymap that will create the repo for me, from within Neovim. I don’t even have to go to GitHub. It will ask me if I want the repo to be private or public, the name I want to use and just do it.

If I’m working on a specific file and I want to go to that exact same file, but in GitHub? No problem, press a keymap and I get there.

These are just a few of the things I can think about from the top of my head.

I’m pretty sure by the end of the video I’ll be like, how could I forget that feature to show up? Yes, it happens. So as you can see, if you can imagine it, Neovim can do it. I didn’t even touch on my Markdown editing workflow, which is my specialty, but we’ll take a look at that another day.

Is it like it sounds, just rainbows and butterflies? Not at all, getting there will take a lot of time and configuring. But in the long run, it will be worth the investment.

By the end of this video, you’ll see the blogpost article up and running, even before the video is out, as I published it from Neovim during the recording.

So after seeing this, what do you think? Why would you ever want to leave all of this power that Neovim, accompanied by a great terminal can offer. My terminal of choice as of now is Kitty. I switched away from Ghostty. If you want to learn why, let me know down in the comments. Also, I talked to Kovid (the creator of the Kitty terminal) a few days ago, and it seems we’ll do another interview one of these days. Part 2. I want to ask him about his OS of choice, Window manager and other Linux related questions. Probably this coming Sunday. So if you have questions, get them ready for the public and free livestream. In the meantime, go and watch the first interview we had a few months ago.

So, will you be giving Neovim a try?

Community-driven promotion

Do you want to promote yourself in my channel? I’m not talking about a company like notion, brilliant, and all those other ones we’re using to seeing. I’m talking about you as a person, do you have a project, course, youtube channel or product and trying to reach an audience?

If interested, pricing and all the details can be found in this other page

You’re a fraud, why do you ask for money, isn’t YouTube Ads enough?

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This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.