My first impressions with Neovim

I consider myself a kind of heavy Emacs user. During some time, about 3 years, I was using Emacs as my daily driven tool for literally everything.

I even used it as my desktop manager for some time. And to be honest, I loved it. It’s cool to have everything in one place, and seeing all the pieces of the system interconnected, it’s cool.

But, I suffered some skill issues when talking about a piece of software that, for me, is important: LSPs. I spend too much time trying to debug performance issues related to Emacs and LSP, and I was not able to find a solution to it, for large codebases it triggers some I/O blocking issues that freeze the entire editor, this wasn’t the ideal kind of experience that I wanted. For that reason, I decided to switch to Neovim.

The first attempt

I’m a real fan of editors who bring the ability to have my config and let me do it in a “declarative” way. Neovim is a great example of that. Just put some code into your init.vim (or init.lua) and take some motions. I appreciate it a lot.

Then, I decided that on a weekend I would try to have a minimal configuration for Neovim and let it be my daily driver for the rest of the next week. The idea was just a simple config to bring what I consider essentials to my daily workflow:

• Some keybindings to navigate between files, buffers, windows, and tabs.
• Some keybindings that improve my quality of life during the usage of Neovim.
• An LSP client to have the ability to use the language server of my choice, given all the languages that I try to use.
• A cool theme, because I want to be cute.
• Some kind of plugin manager, because I think that it’s a great improvement to have it.
• A plugin that lets me easily know the keybindings of the editor, because I can’t remember them all.

The selection of plugins

It was just like 10 plugins, being them:

• lazy.nvim, to manage the plugins.
• LSP support using lsp-config, mason.nvim, and nvim-cmp.
• A theme based on Gruvbox.
• which-key.nvim, similar to the Emacs one, to have a list of all the keybindings that have been defined through the configuration.
• oil.nvim, to have a better experience navigating through files.
• I remapped by myself some keybindings to have a better motion experience using them, mainly for editor/window/file navigation.

It was everything that I wanted, and I think that was the right decision because it gave me some great experience trying to learn more about the native features of Neovim, mainly related to the Vim motions.

Setting up Neovim and documentation

I think that one great feature of Neovim is Lua. Seems to be a great, simple, but powerful language to write code. It has a familiar syntax that can be easily learned if you have a background and don’t need any tricks (that was one of my concerns with EmacsLisp, even though I like EL and Lisp in general).

After you have done the right setup and installed at least the plugins related to Lua and their LSP, you can easily code all the configurations to Neovim. For that, I suggest you use the neodev.nvim plugin, which will help you to have a better experience with the configuration of Neovim.

One aspect of Neovim that I missed a lot was the documentation. I don’t know if is something related to my mental model, but the :help command from Neovim isn’t great compared to the similar one from Emacs. Isn’t easier to iterate through the documentation or even iterate through a Lua code to understand if some piece of code is doing what I want, like executing a piece of the buffer or putting a function into a REPL that can be easily used.

Just in case, I know the existence of the :lua command, but seems to be a bit limited through the developer experience to use it, I think that is the most similar feature that we can have in Neovim to compare through the Emacs part. I need to test more the iron.nvim to validate if it gives some kind of good developer experience at all.

But, the thing that I was most during the first days was: documentation and some tooling to easily iterate to understand something on Neovim.

By the way, after I discovered the Telescope help_tags command, turn made it easier to go through the documentation, it helped me a lot to understand some of the concepts and read them. However, I’m still a bit confused about some aspects of the navigation in the documentation.

Daily workflow and motions

In general, my experience using it as my daily editor was surprisingly good. I think that most of the time, it’s more related to how easily is to navigate through the files and have some kind of ergonomics to do it. For the first days, I was struggling and being a little upset because the learning curve was a bit steep for motions, I was using the Neovim with a cheat sheet to get at least the basic motions, so I don’t look like a gorilla using keyboards and, after a while, I was able to easily use all the simple motions that I needed to do, like those to navigate, to move around the editor, to move to the next/previous line, to move to the next/previous word, etc.

I think that I miss some specific micro-features that I found in other editors, like the ability to move to the previous/next line when hitting the j or k key at the start or end of the line, or the ability to move the line up or down following my cursor, etc. I already saw some custom implementations of all these features, so I think that isn’t a big problem, I’ll just need to implement it by myself.

But, I still struggle with some aspects of the editor, like the substitutions, the search and replace, the undo/redo, etc. I’ll need to better learn how they work to understand it and apply it in the right way easily.

Final thoughts

In general, it was a great experience to use Neovim as my daily driver. It was easier than I expected, and I think that I’m going to stick with it. Although I’m still hitting some issues, I think that all the pros of Neovim are worth it, having a better experience with the editor pay by itself.

If you want to see the configuration of Neovim that I used, you can check it out here. Feel free to use it as a base for your configuration, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask me on Twitter or send me an email.