published: Jan 28 2025
Late last year, I got the chance to give a workshop on Vim and NeoVim alongside a friend of mine for Shiftkey Labs. This made me realized that even though I had been using NeoVim more or less full-time for almost a year at the time (even longer for specific class project), I had never taken the time to write my thoughts about it down anywhere. Two events finally pushed me to write this article. My first reason was my personal Linux server that I built in November 1 and I realized I didn’t want to reuse LazyVim and felt ready to build my own config, and the second reason was my two Co-ops, where I used NeoVim for the first term and vim keybindings in VS Code for my current one. Those two reasons really convinced me to write this article, but first, let’s go back to the basics.
In case you haven’t heard about NeoVim before, you might be asking yourself what it is? NeoVim is a described by its creators as
a Vim-based text editor engineered for extensibility and usability, to encourage new applications and contributions.
In other words, NeoVim is a modern text editor that is extensible and builds upon the foundation of Vim (an older text editor). It’s designed to improved Vim’s performance, maintainability, and usability. It supports Lua as its primary scripting language, which allows users to create powerful and efficient plugins and configurations. NeoVim ships with built-in support for asynchronous plugins, a robust plugin ecosystem, and features like tree-sitter for advanced syntax highlighting. It is highly customizable for developers like us seeking a fast, minimal, and feature-rich coding environment. It retains Vim’s modal editing approach, making it a favourite for users who prioritize keyboard-driven workflows.
As I explained above, NeoVim is a fast but minimal coding environment, and as it ships, it is not an IDE. Which begs the question “Why use NeoVim in 2025?” and honestly, if we’re only looking at NeoVim how it’s shipped, there isn’t actually any reason to use NeoVim in 2025 in my opinion. The editor misses a lot of features that modern IDE all have off the bat. But the difference between NeoVim and modern IDEs is that the former can be highly customized without too much effort and with more or less help depending on your skill level or your need.
With the correct NeoVim config, it can truly become more powerful than most IDEs and much faster. I personally have not regretted switching to NeoVim since I changed over. And if you don’t want to spend too much time building a custom config to perfectly fit your needs, you can find configs (like LazyVim) that you can download and customize to fit your needs a little more. I myself started with LazyVim and used it until around last November when I wrote my first config. But with a little research, you will most likely find the plugins that you would like and how to easily add them to your build.
So, to summarize this section, NeoVim is a good code editor to use in 2025 because of how customizable and fast it is. It’s also a perfect fit for Linux users in my opinion.
One of the most fun part of NeoVim in my opinion is creating your own config. I personally wrote my first config in November of last year and recentky wrote a new one again this month. I find that building your own config is really fun. Not only do you get to learn languages like Lua if you don’t already know it, since that’s the main language used for NeoVim configs, but you also get to completely customize your IDE. I personally based my latest config on Josean Martinez’s config for 2024. I followed his basic config blog post and added extra plugins that I like a lot, like Noice for example.
The beauty of an editor like NeoVim is that, being an open-source tool, it has a huge community of dedicated programmers and users that create new plugins for it all the time, which can really bring the editor to a whole new level. I myself recently found out you could implement a debugger directly into your config, which combined with autocompletion, LSP and git integration, it allows NeoVim to compete with other modern IDEs. I’ve even recently found that you can implement plugins that bring A.I. into your config. So you really get to build your perfect IDE without spending any money on it (just a lot of time).
Before you just jump into NeoVim as your main IDE, I would recommend a few things. Firstly, I wouldn’t necessarily just build your own config right away. As much fun as it can be, it is a lot of work, and I find that I couldn’t do it properly myself on the first try and needed to try it a second time with help. I think that beginners would be better off actually starting with a premade config like LazyVim or Astro Nvim. These premade configs come packed with a bunch of features that are all setup for you and easy to use, but they also let you customize these features or add more plugins easily.
I would also recommend checking out the vim cheat sheet and vim tutor to familiarize yourself a bit with the vim keys and commands. Like most people will tell you, the vim keys (also used in NeoVim) are not intuitive, so having a reference at first will be very useful as you get used to the keybinds and comfortable.
Lastly, have fun with it. Switching to NeoVim should not feel like a chore or be difficult. Don’t expect to jump in and be a pro, if you take your time and nake sure to enjoy using NeoVim, you’ll get better in no time. NeoVim has a very steep learning curve in my experience, but it can be a lot of fun to use once you get into it and does make your workflow much faster. It also is very easy to use on a terminal if you were thinking of becoming a terminal user.
An article about this project is coming soon ↩
© Copyright 2025. Made by Gab Savard.