Approaching neovim the right way: intro

Video editor: kdenlive Image editor: gimp OS: nixos

Neovim, a fork of vim, which itself a fork of vi

Vi based editors are mode based editors. They're meant to be fast, efficient, and easy to navigate.

Vim and Neovim can also be heavily configured, and have a plethora of plugins that can do more than the vanilla versions.

Have your LSP auto suggest stuff? Done! Use a debugger inside of it Done! Run a game inside Neovim? Done!

In this series, we'll focus solely on Neovim.

Neovim is a modal editor, to explain them quickly: Normal mode is for navigating around. Visual mode is for selecting texts. Insert mode is for inserting texts. Replace mode is for replacing texts. Command mode is for using vim commands. There is also terminal mode and ex mode, but we will get to those later.

It's written in C, but its main strength is uses Lua for plugin development. The plugin ecosystem is pretty unique too. Although most plugins that are used are written in either Lua or Vimscript, There are also plugins written in Python, and it also supports Ruby, Perl and Node-js

Unlike some IDEs, neovim internally doesn't ship with autocompletion, linters, formatters, bla bla bla bla. But it has support for it, so you can use the tools YOU want. Making your fully own custom setup. Those tools also run separately on the background, so unlike some IDEs, you don't get constant freezes on a low-end machine.

Now I want to say a few things in this introduction.

This series would be about learning and understanding Neovim. It's not your average "Make Neovim 0 to IDE" type series.

This series' main focus is not to have a fully featured Neovim setup. Instead we'll focus on learning Neovim itself, and learning the Neovim ecosystem.

If your main focus is the end goal, then this is probably not for you. But if your main focus is to learn and understand Neovim, then this series is for you. And eventually, you, yourself would be able to create your own setup from scratch.

A person wouldn't probably able to learn, understand, and implement all Neovim has to offer in their lifetime, But you can do a lot of crazy stuff with just the basics, and building on top of that.

To give you an idea, my first commit on my Neovim config was made on June 15, 2024. It was only a simple init.vim back then, but in just one year it has become a real large repo with a lot of files. I've also made a few Neovim plugins myself while also switching to Linux, first using Arch then Gentoo then Nix, trying to improve my programming skills, while also dealing with depression, life, and all that.

So yeah. If you want to actually learn about neovim, you can do it pretty easily in just a few days. But you do need patience, and the willingness to learn.

Most people, including Theprimeagen and Tjdevries, will often tell you that you should use kickstart.nvim first. Some may tell you to use lazyvim or some other neovim distro first. I love both prime and tj, and i've learned a lot from them, you should definitely subscribe to them cz they make GREAT content. But i disagree with them in this topic.

In my humble opinion, the best way to learn, is just diving in head first into a topic. It forces you to survive, to adapt, and it forces you to learn. When you're handed a mostly usable neovim setup on a silver platter, most people won't try to learn more, except change a few stuff here and there. Also, trying to understand and debug what you wrote, is much easier than trying to understand and debug what other people wrote, even with a thousand comments, cz at the start, you'll probably won't even know what to look for.

This will be all for this video, I'll catch you folks on the next one. PEACE!

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