Overview

Pros and Cons

The pros and cons of Neovim are similar to those of Vim.

Advantages

  • Lightweight

  • Fully keyboard-driven workflow

  • Highly configurable

DIsadvantages

  • Steep learning curve

For most people, daily development work is already exhausting. It’s hard to find extra energy to learn Neovim. Isn’t VS Code, which works out of the box, good enough?

That’s true—getting started is always the hardest part. But I hope this documentation can help more people lower the learning barrier and experience the charm of Neovim/Vim more quickly.

Why Tmux

Tmux is a terminal multiplexer. Neovim is an editor that runs in the terminal. There are several reasons to learn Tmux:

  1. When editing files, you often need to switch between different directories.

  2. After editing files, you often need to run terminal commands.

  3. Keybindings for Tmux and Neovim need to be considered together to avoid conflicts.

Using Tmux together with Neovim can make your workflow more flexible and efficient.

Configuring Tmux can be complicated, but fortunately there are many open-source configurations to refer to. I used samoshkin/tmux-config as a reference, which makes Tmux almost ready to use out of the box.

My Tmux config: qiujiandong/tmux-config

Neovim Kickstart

The easiest way to get started with Neovim is to refer to existing configurations online. Many people on GitHub share their Neovim setups. Generally, the more widely used a config is, the more proven it becomes. I got started using kickstart.nvim.

TJ DeVries even has a YouTube video introducing this configuration, which was super beginner-friendly for me!

My Neovim config: qiujiandong/kickstart.nvim