Ramblings of an aging IT geek
← Ramblings of an aging IT geek
tooling

half in, half out of neovim

A gradual, low-drama switch from Vim to Neovim by reusing the same config and only adopting the new bits that actually pull their weight.

A mechanical keyboard lit by a terminal

I've been "moving to Neovim" for about two months now, which tells you how committed the move has been. No grand rewrite of my config, no weekend spent rebuilding everything from scratch. I pointed Neovim at my existing ~/.vimrc with a one-line shim, watched almost all of it just work, and started using it for half my editing.

The honest reason I switched isn't the async or the embedded terminal, though both are nice. It's that the async stuff means linters and the like run without freezing the editor for half a second every time I save a large file. That pause in plain Vim was a tiny papercut I'd stopped noticing until it was gone, and now I can't unnotice it.

What's stopped me going all-in is that my muscle memory and a couple of plugins still live in old Vim, and I haven't bothered to fully untangle them. So I run both. Neovim for day-to-day code, plain Vim when I'm SSH'd into some box that doesn't have it, which is most of them. They share enough config that the context switch costs nothing, and that's exactly why the migration has no urgency. Slowly is fine. Slowly is, in fact, the whole point.