A Love Letter to Neovim

Summary

I started using Vim in 2011. Not because I was trying to make a point, and definitely not because I knew what I was doing. I was probably following some blog post, copying a .vimrc, and wondering why pressing j moved the cursor instead of typing a letter. The first week was rough. The first month was weird. Then Vim’s model started to make sense, and every other editor began to feel like it had a layer of padding between me and the code. All these years later, Neovim is still the tool I trust the most. I have used VS Code. I have used JetBrains IDEs. I have played with Sublime, Atom, Zed, and whatever else was having a moment. Some of them are genuinely good. JetBrains tools are absurdly capable. VS Code won because it is good enough for almost everyone and easy to extend. I still pick Neovim. The reason is simple: Neovim keeps up with the way I work. Not always with the speed I type, because typing is not really the point. Editing code is mostly moving around, changing small pieces, deleting the wrong abstraction, reshaping a function, jumping between files, running tests, checking diagnostics, and doing that loop again. Neovim is built around that loop. Most editors treat text like a document and the keyboard like an input device. Vim treats editing like a language. That sounds a little dramatic until you spend enough time with it. ci" means change inside quotes. dap deletes a paragraph. . repeats the last change. Macros let you teach the editor a tiny routine once and replay it across a file. Text objects let you operate on meaning instead of counting characters. That is the part people miss when they say Vim is just keyboard shortcuts. It is not a bag of shortcuts. It is a grammar. Once that grammar gets into your hands, the editor becomes a lot less noisy. You stop dragging the mouse across code. You stop clicking through sidebars just to find a file. You stop reaching for a command palette for things you do fifty times a day. The common actions become small, d...