It just feels like it's hard to nail down your preferred workflow / setup ... but it's likely worth it if you're using it daily!
Are there any good visual or video demos of using this type of setup? I'm having trouble picturing what makes people really love this type of TUI-only workflow.
This kind of setup is at its most powerful when you live on the command line though. For instance, you need to modify .py files across multiple projects that mention a certain variable, have a certain word in their name, and were modified within the last month.
That search is a bit easier in bash/zsh than it is in most IDEs and the strength of vim/neovim is the shell integration.
I typically have a terminal-heavy workflow so it's very rare that I'm browsing to files from within my desktop, but if I am using Dolphin to look for a file I have a "Open terminal here" shortcut and then I'll usually just run "nvim doc.md".
Why not give it a try? You'll likely find that there's an adjustment period and you can always switch back to your old editor if you don't like it. The beauty of it is that you can build it into whatever IDE you want instead of having useless features shoved into your IDE whether you use them or not.
The nice thing is that I rely only on the keyboard, no need to point with the mouse. It may not be faster, but typing is sequential and there’s no context switching. So muscle memory helps a lot. Just like you don’t think about each character when you write, I don’t really think about the shortcuts and commands I use.
Another thing I picked up from my time with emacs was making keybinds to interact with the "other" window. One macro I use often will delete the second line of the file in my current window, save, change to the other window, delete second line, save, change back to original window. When activated from keybind it all happens approximately instantly. I also have some binds to jump to the top of the other window's file (without leaving my cursor stuck over there) and so on, letting me keep my cursor in the main area most of the time.
Also the buffer’s local variable in vim comes from different sources. In emacs, a lot of stuff are tied to a major or minor mode. You only have to toggle them to switch between keybinds, syntax,…
There's a hackish way to do it by watching for Neovim command line commands that start with "/Users/" (change it if you are on other OS).
Your coding agent can probably hack something up based on:
`//Hackish supports drag and drop files into Neovim by examining when command line starts with "/Users/".`
Just use a fuzzy file finder within the terminal or within vim itself.