Neovim: Text Editor of the past, present and the future generations

-

 My all time favorite text editor of choice has been Vim. Even though this text editor has a seriously dangerous learning curve (I don't think so) it is worth learning the, at least for it's one of a kind and highly productive mouse-less editing experience.

In this article, I'll briefly explain the editing experience using Vim, in particular a distribution of Vim called Neovim.

Neovim has been a great source of joy for me personally. Vim is configured using it's very own scripting language called vimscript, whereas Neovim on the other hand, is configured using Lua, a full-fledged scripting language, unlike vimscript which is only limited to configuring vim.

I have been using Neovim for almost 4 years now. I started off using Vim, hated the learning curve, but at some point, it clicked, I enjoyed using the HJKL keys for navigation and I missed the keybinding whenever I used some GUI programs.

When I started learning Vim, good resources were Luke Smith's video on using Vim, Distrotube's vim playlist, and also this channel TJ DeVries who is the lead contributor to the Neovim project.

It might sound like a chore to learn using vim or neovim, but trust me, once you get past the initial hurdle of learning, it's a breeze to edit or just about do anything in neovim.

There are trillions of plugins available for neovim, and I've been using around 15 plugins or so to make my life even more comfortable in neovim. Best place to look for plugins would be on youtube, or Awesome Neovim plugins.

Some of the best plugins I'd recommend are

  • Luasnip - snippet engine
  • Lazy - lazy-loading package manager for faster up-speed
  • Neorg- note taking like org-mode in emacs in neovim
  • Nvim-surround - easily surround symbols around words
  • Telescope - Modern UI fuzzy finder tool with extreme extensibility.
     

Dashboard plugin for neovim

C++ code in neovim



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My experience of the Winter School held at IISER TVM

-
Image
 I am writing this blog post to share my experience at the Winter School I participated at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Thiruvananthapuram (previously known as Trivandrum), Kerala, India. This is the second batch of the winter school started by IISER TVM. The winter school is called as Refresher and Preparative Winter School (RPWS). It is directed to the students who want to take up research as their career after their Masters. There were three departments for the winter school - Physics, Chemistry and Biology. The intake for the program was only 50 all over India. Application required us to submit our grade details and recommendation letters. I was really lucky to get selected for the winter school. IISER TVM Campus  The campus is situated in a very secluded area, almost 60 km from the city of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. The campus has necessary amenities like Health Centre, indoor stadium, tennis court, basketball court, volleyball court, cricket court,
Read more

SonifyCPP - A software for converting images to music magically

-
Image
 Well.....it's not magic, it's programming and mathematics that's helping us produce the music or audio signals. A while back, around November of 2023, I had participated in the NASA Hackathon. There was variety of projects to choose from to work, I chose the project called "Image Sonification". Me and my team members had 48 hours to code the software in any language we wanted. We chose to do it in Python for some reason. Okay, I'll back up out of the flashback for a second to describe what Image Sonification actually is. Similar to how microphone is used to produce some audio signals and then is processed on a digital audio workstation to produce a digital audio, Image sonification refers to the process of converting the images to audio signals. Coming back to the hackathon flashback, we finished coding the project to produce some sort of "music" from input images that were smaller resolution (We couldn't figure out a way to optimize the code to
Read more

First time participating in a solo instrumental event

-
I recently participated in the inter-college fest SAMYOGA conducted by JAIN (Deemed-to-be University), Jayanagar Campus for the two events, Battle of Bands (BOB) and Solo Instrumental . For the BOB, we chose to play the three songs, Love is a long road - Tom Petty You give love a bad name - Bon Jovi Rock you like a hurricane - Scorpions  Many participants from different colleges had come to participate in these events. Almost all the colleges performed really well in BOB. We got the third slot to perform, and I feel that we performed really well. No fault whatsoever this time, no change in tempo, no mess-up by anyone from the team. Here is a little glimpse of the performance.   The BOB and solo instrumental event had a clash in timings, due to the poor time management by the coordinators of the event. Added to this, there was only one drum kit in the venue. This was a problem because both the events started simultaneously, and all the participants of the solo instrumental event bro
Read more