Once you go Vim, you can never go back

Okay, okay the title might be a little click-baity as I’m talking really about NeoVim but the message is still the same.

Once you go Vim, you can never go back.

I started my journey like most of you…

VS Code with a ton of extensions for things I didn’t even need or care about.

Don’t get me wrong. I was more than happy to use VS Code for my job. It had great keyboard shortcuts, great extension ecosystem and most importantly… an extension for GitHub Copilot.

So what changed?

Funny story actually. At the time I was using Debian as my main driver OS and I really had no problem with it. Everything was working properly and I was even using it for some minor gaming.

I was talking with a colleague who is using Mac about something non-relevant and he made a joke:

“You’re a literal anarchist so you run Linux on everything. Why don’t you go ahead and start compiling your own packages as well?”

Oh no. I had an idea.

I was already aware of Gentoo and the way it handles things, but never got around to actually taking it for a spin. Be it being too lazy, sick of GNOME stuff I didn’t even use or just too afraid to break something — your call.

Anyways, I decided I’m finally gonna step up and take Gentoo for a spin.

The install process was fairly straightforward and I didn’t run into any issues. Yet.

After installing and configuring all of my base necessities like i3 and polybar I was finally ready to install VS Code and set up Copilot.

It’s just VS Code so it has to work out-of-the-box right? Right?

For some reason I was having trouble installing my beloved Copilot because of some missing stuff I didn’t really want to install anyway so I searched around to see if I can make it work.

After losing hours to Google searches I simply gave up and looked into alternatives. Copilot offers extensions for many editors and one of them is Vim.

Now, at this point I’d used Vim for simple text editing when nano wasn’t an option and didn’t have any major experience with it. But things were about to change.

I installed NeoVim as I heard it offered more than regular Vim and started playing around.

I was hooked.

Everything was so simple and configurable. All my extensions were working flawlessly and I was more productive than I ever was.

Did I mention that I never had to leave my terminal or wait for VS Code to open?

I’m a huge advocate for TUI and CLI apps in general and being able to work from a terminal made my day.

I didn’t have to wait for the chunky Chrome binary to load and do my bidding anymore and all of my keybindings were similar if not the same.

I researched more and more and created a config that helps me do my work faster than I ever could in VS Code.

All that without leaving the terminal.

After everything I started using NeoVim daily and never once thought back to going back to VS Code or even Debian for that matter (love you Gentoo).

I really think there’s a huge gain in learning to use Vim as you’re not really always going to have a GUI interface.

If someone is interested I pushed my config to a GitHub repository free for everyone to copy and extend to their liking.