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I am an Avid Vim User, Finally Migrated to Neovim! How does it work, what do I gain from it?

Umair-khurshid on June 23, 2024

Having migrated to Neovim, I will give you some feedback and give you the keys to understanding and succeeding in your migration to Neovim! First o...
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Brian Masinick

I am sorry to inform you that Bram Moolenaar, the creator of Vim, passed away on August 3, 2023 at the young age of 62.

2 Proven, Liam (7 August 2023). "RIP Bram Moolenaar: Coding world mourns Vim creator". The Register. Archived from the original on 8 August 2023. Retrieved 7 August 2023. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Moolenaar

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Umair-khurshid

Ah! Never heard about it.

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Chirag Aggarwal

Great post mate! Have you tried neovim configs like lunar vim? I personally love it

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Umair-khurshid

No, I have not but I just searched and it looks great. Thanks for the suggestion!

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Ben Sinclair

One of the weaknesses of Vim, for a long time, was the quality of compression

Did you mean, "comprehension"?

I like neovim as well, but some of the points you make are a bit confusing. Why do you think telescope is better than fzf? You say:

It allows you to search for files, and even text patterns, while offering an interface with file previews!

But fzf does that as well, all out-the-box!

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Umair-khurshid

Yeah, I meant "comprehension" instead of "compression" but auto-suggest did it's thing. Thanks for pointing that out! You're right that fzf also allows searching for files and text patterns. However, I prefer Telescope because it offers an enhanced user experience wwith other Neovim features.

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Alex

Great post! I still use vim only semi-regularly so I stick to the OG but now I understand more why so many people like neovim specifically

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Umair-khurshid

Trust me, it's worth the hype!

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Bernd Wechner

I use vi still (usually vim in the background I guess, I dunno, I just type vi file) out of habit (I belong to that generation that was using line editors before vi came along, just after the card reader generation).

But this made smile:

Unfortunately, sometimes we have no choice and have to make changes often via SSH. Suffice it to say that your IDE will be of little help to you. So I did like everyone else, use Vim.

Not least because I used to agree, and that indeed accounted for a fair deal of my vi use. But still, for at least a decade I'd guess I would have written your note more like this:

Unfortunately, sometimes we have no choice and have to make changes often via ssh. Suffice it to say that your IDE will be of little help to you. So I do like everyone else, use sshfs!

sshfs is a dream come true. If I have ssh access, I can access the remote filesystem locally and use local (read, GUI) tools. Pufff, there went a lot of the vi use cases right there. In practice I use my desktop file browser (Nemo usually) and whatever IDEs or editors suit the task and are available to me.

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Brian Masinick • Edited

One other point: while very extensible, both Vim and Neovim (usually executed as nvim) are extremely fast and efficient if you run them 100% stock. While still effective, as you increase the number of add-ons, it stands to reason that resource usage increases, though never to the extent of a heavy Web browser!

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