Tools – Developer Productivity 2

Lets start with your editor

Now i am going to show you around neovim, not because you are going to use neovim, or that i am trying to convince you to use neovim. You should use neovim because you want to explore other ways of editing. Also, its good understand just how hackable it is and perhaps you will be willing to try it

Creating your own neovim experience

I'll just give you a brief look at neovim and what you can do. This isn't really a "follow" along section, but if you already have neovim setup, you could.

One more note about vim

If you are getting a bit vim curious, seeing people fly around, its totally normal. But i do want to warn you about 2 things.

you live in a world where you have really different mentality. This isn't the era that vi or vim was created. So many modern luxuries that its hard to connect at first with Vim. So the best thing you can do at first is to learn vim motions. Once you are sufficiently amazing at vim motions, then move on to using vim. And of course, i recommend neovim
When you first use vim, there is no filetree on the left, menu at the top, just text on the screen. This will make it hard to even read code because of how unfamiliar and hostile the environment seems. Don't worry, that feeling will go away.

Lets go over some of the motions

Perhaps to give you a taste, lets go over some of the motions and why its amazing.

We can also go over some of the awesome remaps that i have dev'd / been given over the last few years.

motions
qfix
harpoon
navigation
macros
commands
help
your first init script

But why neovim?

We get the best of both worlds, a modern IDE and vim motions. Why would I ever use neovim?

defense for neovim
the bonus of using neovim that isn't quite the same with other editors

Lets play with the neovim api

Expected Code

local function read_file_with_system(filename)
  local pipe = vim.system({"cat", filename})
  local content = pipe:wait().stdout
  local lines = vim.split(content, "\n", { trimempty = true })
  return lines
end

local api = vim.api
local buf = api.nvim_create_buf(false, true)
local win = api.nvim_open_win(buf, false, {
    relative="editor",
    width=80,
    height=24,
    row=0,
    col=0,
})
api.nvim_buf_set_lines(buf, 0, -1, false, read_file_with_system("./package.json"))

vim.defer_fn(function()
    api.nvim_win_close(win, true)
end, 5000)

There is so much more

that was just a taste and there is so much more. I highly recommend playing around with the apis and making anything that you want.

A quick note about AI

One really nice thing about neovim is that the api is so well documented and the surface area so well defined that you can often one shot exactly what you need with neovim and chatgpt.

this isn't always the case, it still makes up stuff ~5% of the time, but its close.

VimBeGood

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