Just Fucking Use Neovim | Hacker News Reader

Just Fucking Use Neovim

justfuckinguseneovim.com

23 pointshacb20 comments

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We know the author is edgy and cool because they swear a lot, don't care about sentence structure, and their shift key only works 30% of the time.

We know they're wise because they insult everything else in the world and claim to know the one true way.

There are parts of the old internet that I don't miss.

In 2026 when every other article is LLM output, I don’t mind the occasional edgelord rant

True! it does grate, but less than slop. Not sure why Neovim though, most of the boxes I sometimes have to peek into only have vim, and that's just Ok.

not only that, he also called that wall of text a "manifesto" lol

I actually use Neovim. What brings me joy more than using it though, is pretending I don't to wind the zealots up. I'll even open VS Code sometimes and do something extremely slowly in front of them while I watch the rage build up. Lovely way to unwind when you get the chance.

Or just use what works best for you, since everyone is a little different, but don't forget to try new things to see if they work better for you moving forward. Oh, and don't be like this author, and don't tell people what to do like me and this author.

And us Emacs snobs look down on you Neovim newbs the same way you condescend to GUI IDE users.

/s, I hope.

If this is a psyop to shame people into using Neovim, I don't think it's going to have the desired result. It's so absurd I'm not entirely sure.

"Don't emberrase yourself..." k.

Ah, to be 14 again.

*Laughs in vis*

https://github.com/martanne/vis

Every time I try to use neovim something goes wrong and I give up. It sucks on windows because fuck you windows users obviously, I mean I definitely should change my OS just so I can run neovim but I haven't got round to doing that sorry.

But I also tried it on linux (Fedora, whatever version I was running at the time) and WSL (Ubuntu this time) and I still couldn't get it to work.

Checking my notes, last time (03/25) I was trying to get it to work with an LSP server a colleague had created for an in-house programming language. After pulling my hair out with installation instructions and getting the right version to play ball with the LSP server it seems I hit a snag with neovim not picking up the vimrc_example.vim file from the location it said it should, and then an error when I removed the file at the path of the vimrc_example it wasn't picking up options from (meaning it really was accessing the first file but just ignoring everything in it). It seems I was trying to use that file because it was recommended by the neovim dox online (I think the dox said to create an init.lua file pointing to that vim file).

So I gave up on neovim and went back to using vim.

Now, what's all that puerile invective in the article above about? How is swearing at your users going to make them appreciate your work? Wouldn't it be better to just have something that's easy to use? I've installed vim on all my computers running every major operating system and it's never gave me any trouble with picking up its vimrc or anything else really (except plugins... plugins suck).

Why is neovim so hard to get started with? It's a fork of vim, right? What did the devs change that so drastically changes the experience using vim? I don't understand.

Real devs use `ed`.

You are 15 years old and just discovered the virtues of Neovim, what to do now? The world - ecxuse me, the whole fucking world - needs to know ASAP, they need to learn about your discovery of the philosopher's stone of editing wisdom. Preach, brother, preach, even if the lingo better fits that church across the road with the upside-down cross, pentacle and ominous-looking goat's head.

Jesus Christ, this is condescending and toxic.

Let people do what they want!

Bet hes a fun co-worker.

Just fucking fuck off! Fuck!

no

Incredibly cringe lol

Neovim users proving once again they're the equivalent of BMW drivers /s

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