The story

As a Neovim user, I have been “asked” why on earth I use Neovim for my daily driver for building products and doing some general programming. I’ve given a lot of various answers over time, starting from boasting about the performance benefits, the flex of not touching my mouse, and so on.

But over time, as I have grown my understanding, and widened my view of this world, I have found a few key reasons that I might think are why I keep sticking to using Neovim.

I’d like to make this journal my go-to answer if in the future some people are asking me why I do the way I do. Not because I don’t want to answer them. But, I’d like to give them the most thorough, clear, and concise answers possible.

I “own” it

I am not the creator of Vim or Neovim, I am not that old (sorry Bram, RIP❤️). But, since Neovim itself, after the installation, will only give you the bare minimum things (like minimum), I have to add some plugins, configure it, and manage it to be able to use it as I want to.

I think the last sentences speak a lot: …as I want it to be.

Building, configuring, and managing the tools, that a Software Engineer uses in your day-to-day life makes me always feel excited every time I open my terminal and spins up my Neovim. It always prompts me to ask myself: “Ah, what should I code today?“.

My setups are so personalised for me that’s why it is called a “Personalised Development Environment”.

It prompts me to learn more

I’ve never heard about LSP before, but I have to configure the LSP on my editor.

I’ve never heard about AST, parser or any other cool computer science terms before. But I have to at least have some grasp on them to understand how my editor works.

It’s fun

I realised that building your PDE requires time and energy. I can give you all of the technical advantages and try to convince you to join the bandwagon. but, if you ask me why I keep doing this, is because it is fun for me.

I can spend my night just to choose the best colour scheme that suits my needs and liking. It was fun.

I can spend some time figuring out the best key bindings for my frequent tasks. It was fun.

Should you try?

Yes! But, in the end, I realised that the most important thing is that you enjoy what you do. If you think you are much more comfortable working in Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ, or anything else (even Notepad), go for it.