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Comment by joshcsimmons | Hacker News Reader

This is so interesting and complex! I'm relatively new to Neovim - I've tried to learn a couple of times but it finally "took" a few months ago.

Genuine question for the author - have you configured Vim this way in order to be more productive or because you enjoy customizing it? I don't mean for that to be antagonistic, people build and customize muscle cars to show off even though they're slower than Teslas.

It's wild to see the community around recreating VSCode in the terminal (Astro Nvim, NvChad, etc.) I guess if I had to customize Vim so much for it to be a usable solution I'd just go back to using VSCode. After all, keyboard-action-speed is pretty much never the bottleneck when coding, thinking is.

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I went the opposite direction, from nvim to vscode, and I've never had to "configure" anything again.

Look some people just like tinkering. To me a text editor is a tool, not a hobby or a love affair. You see people going "I've added 100 plugins and it's great now" and the same people later "I've got rid of 100 pluggins and it's great now". The mean time I'm getting stuff done.

In my opinion, neovim is productive out of the box. I'd recommend grabbing lazyvim if one wants something fancier and customize it from there if needed.

I've used vim as primary editor for about a decade. Just started using Cursor (vscode fork) for last few months and still much prefer nvim - but copilot++ is a game changer so I deal with it. I do use the vscode-neovim extension.

The biggest thing I miss is a terminal based workflow. I find GUI editors unnatural. Much prefer my editor in the terminal.

I prefer modal editing. It feels the best to me, but that could be because I learned it.

I had to learn vim back when I was a basic system administrator so when it came time to start doing real coding it was an obvious choice. I also prefer properly open source software, and if possible, non-corporate backed. So it checks all my boxes especially now that I'm not "missing" anything from VSCode.

When people ask me though I recommend VSCode to most normies, I don't think vim is worth it nowadays.

I love editing in Vim, but I definitely want nice things and IDE features. At this point I've had a better time getting Vim editing into VS Code than getting VS Code IDE features into Vim.

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