Changing my editor to nvim

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So I have been spending a bit of time with my tooling at the moment. Previously I was using visual studio code on Linux as my main editor and meson/ninja for building.

For the small projects I do at home this set up works quite well. With the exception of rename refactoring I don't miss the features of a more full IDE. Again for small projects, I might change my mind if I was working on a million line C++ project at home.

At home I drift from using a desktop PC to a, now aging, laptop and back again. It has no rhyme or reason to it. Using an editor like VS code on a laptop is slightly annoying and I have fairly big hands and those cursor keys are all scrunched together. I am not a fan of touch pads either for anything more than browsing.

The natural progression here is to not use the cursors keys. To me that means a return to vim. I actually decided to use neovim because of the built in terminal integration. Of course, other than playing with it I have not used it in anger. Neovim is nice but then so is vim.

Using this setup is much more relaxing on the hands when using a laptop and to be consistent I use it on my desktop. Vim/Neovim put me in a mindset of gradually improvement something that I find missing when using an out of the box experience.

This is not just about installing much needed plugins but also about having builds done automatically on a separate terminal whenever a file is changes. I never have to trigger a build. That adds up to a lot of saved key presses over a week of coding. Yes it is reliant on fast builds. If my current project had tests I would also automatically run them.

Will I end up more efficient than when I work in visual studio (the IDE I use at work). May be or may be not it is hard to measure. It would be nice but I really want my way of coding at home to be relaxed so I find it a pleasure to code. To do this I am willing to drop a bit of productivity for it.

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