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

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 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



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