Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I use Neovim exclusively for the past 4 years or so. Before that I used WebStorm + sometimes Vim for another 6 years or so. To this day I'm thankful to my colleague and mentor, who introduced me to the basics of Vim (you know, how to quit it and all that) saying "it get's pretty handy when you need to edit something on the server"; that was probably around 14 years ago.

WebStorm was great, it was really magical how it just knows how this or that code relates to another piece of code, navigating around was a bliss. Where is that variable defined? Jump to definition, and you're there. You want to know what's that function does, even if it's somewhere in third-party libraries? No problem, jump to definition. The fuzzy-finder for everything (literally. From file names to methods to editor's commands and variables) was also amazing.

At some point though I got a bit annoyed with the fact that it took 5 seconds to start it up (multiply that by amount of different projects you need to open), and it's general resource hungry-ness. So I started experimenting with Neovim 0.3 (at the time), and pretty quickly managed to get near-webstorm experience with gutentags, fzf and amazing vim-fugitive for all the git things I did in the command line. And with resent native lsp & treesitter, it doesn't

I tried VSCode once, which was a fiasco -- for some reason it failed jumping to definition in a basic react project with typescript. Oh well.

Helix looks really cool, I'm playing around the idea of using it more, though I still will have to keep (Neo)vim around for vim-fugitive. Slightly concerned with how much muscle-memory re-training will needed though, then again it didn't took me too much to get to the same level of ease of use with Doom Emacs. Speaking of which, it worked flawlessly (and has even better git tool), but still was terribly slow at times, so in the end got too annoying to work with.

So in the end it boils down to Neovim being fast, not getting in the way, and habit, I guess.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: