this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Hey everyone!

I was just wondering why one would use any of the programs I mentioned above instead of VS Code to write Code.

Can someone give me a brief overview of the advantages?

Thanks in advance!

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[–] Hundun@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago

For me NVIM has several really cool advantages: NVIM is really fast. With a good terminal emulator I can open enormous log files and be able to navigate around/search immediately. I have recently pivoted to DevOps, and using VSCode to interact with large log files made me realize how slow and sluggish it actually is.

Motions and modal editing. Plenty of people have already said how fast it is, I will just add that it is also very fun and, if you dig around a bit, not that hard to learn.

Configuration using Lua - I like it because my configs are simple git repos, so the file structure and the logic of configuration is easy for me to work with. I always thought VSCode to be quite awkward to configure. Also, using Lua instead of JSON makes it incredibly flexible, and as a tinkerer I find a lot of joy in customizing things.

NVIM (or VIM) is ubiquitous. You can expect it everywhere, and every other IDE has VIM-like bindings. Learn VIM = be comfortable anywhere.

A personal perk for me personally is that NVIM is designed to be used without a mouse. Mice give me wrist pain, and switching to NVIM made my work a lot more bearable.

If you're thinking about trying it out, I would recommend going for a community-maintained distributions like AstroNvim or ChadNvim. It's also quite cool to go back to your preferred editor, knowing your preferences are now more refined after trying alternatives.

Anyway, good luck