Tag Archives: neovim

Work Style

Getting Started with Neovim

I spent some of grad school really getting into Vim. Then I shifted around, and most recently I’ve been using VSCode. A number of my colleagues (per screen-share demonstrations) seem to use some kind of neovim, but I’ve not really talked to anyone about it. I think I learned about neovim a while ago from Hacker news, so it’s been very lightly on my radar.

I like the general idea of the editor being something you get-in-and-get-out–vim’s original idea. I really tried to use Emacs as an OS a while ago, and I was never quite able to buy into that. Alon those lines, when I see various youtube videos on how to set up neovim, so many of them basically celebrate setting it up as an IDE. This suggests they don’t see the same “cost” to plugins that I do!

Cost of Plugins

Plugins add some functionality to neovim, but in turn increase the size of the cross-product-of-compatibility you have to worry about. If I have 30 plugins active when editing some source file, and suddenly neovim crashes, I have at least 31 things to consider investigating. I’d rather not! Even in the non-buggy case, when there is a plugin that I really like, to a degree I have to care about the compatibility of it with all the other plugins. This is true as things upgrade, or there’s some hotness (like a new plugin manager) that suddenly half the plugins want to move to, and half the plugins don’t. From what I can tell so far the plugins in neovim work hard to maintain compatibility, but that’s just it: it’s hard work!

Using “just” neovim doesn’t spare one from this, of course, but meaningfully reduces that cost. In a sentence, plugins increase the area-of-compatibility-concern quadratically.

Goal of Using Neovim

I’m comfortable, in theory at least, to customize nvim. That, plus its wealth of code motions and operations (for which I’ve been a middling amateur!) feels like it opens a lot of doors to improving the inner loop of my work. “Surround” motions, registers, marks, and of course the genuinely-great plugins available are things that, if I really internalize, might very well really help me. So I’m going to be looking at neovim with that aim.

Work Style

Revisiting My Tools

Part 1: Context and Goals

Every few years I end up feeling motivated to change the tools, or how I use the tools, to do my hobby programming and writing (and professional work). This time has come again. Oh no.

The conceit is, of course, that new usages and tools will be “better”, and I will consequently be more effective at what I want to do. In truth it’s hard to really see that happening on net. So this is basically for fun, but I can hope it will lead me to a durably-better place.

Anyways, this time I’ve decided to really lean into the idea of improving my inner-work-loop: really be conscious of what I’m doing when developing or writing, and so see opportunities where I’m doing something silly. Things like ensuring I’m doing incremental builds, handy Vim motions, running very targeted tests, and so on, are easy to put off, and I think I’ve put them off too much. I say this partly as a reaction to the other direction, where people spend their whole lives optimizing their Vim macros (or whatever) to the detriment of the work-actual these tools are purported to help!

So I’ve decided to take the time to do a wholesale revisiting on my off hours. (This has the added advantage of being mentally simple: I’ve not had the mental energy to really dive into caching algorithms the way I had hoped, as I’m currently stretched thin in a few ways.) The tools I’ve assessed and decided to lean into are:

The actual OS will be WSL on Windows, and I’ll be using the Windows terminal as the entry point into Tmux.

Next Steps

I’ve actually already done quite a bit in learning and getting used to the above tools already. I anticipate a sequence of blog posts following this in which I either opine on tools in general, or include notes on what I’m doing in particular. Writing this out might help me durably remember some useful tricks, and at least force to me articulate what I’m trying to get out of this latest round of revisiting. For any other readers, hopefully this will be interesting or useful.