I am not a Vim evangelist and I have no intention of becoming one. I came to Neovim the boring way: my main editor felt heavier every year, the cold-start time crept up, and I kept reaching for the terminal anyway. So rather than a dramatic switch, I've been moving over slowly, one task at a time, keeping the old editor open for anything that hurt too much.
That gradual approach is the only reason it stuck. The first few attempts over the years failed because I tried to go all in on a Monday morning with a project deadline on Friday. This time I gave myself permission to be slow and to lose, occasionally.
What actually changed
The unlock was the built-in LSP client. Older me associated Vim with grep-and-pray navigation. Modern Neovim talks to the same language servers my heavy editor used, so go-to-definition, find-references, hover docs and rename all just work. That removed the single biggest reason I kept the old editor around.
My config is intentionally small. I lean on a handful of well-worn plugins and resist the urge to assemble a thousand-line setup I'll never fully understand.
-- lsp setup, trimmed
local lspconfig = require('lspconfig')
lspconfig.gopls.setup({})
lspconfig.rust_analyzer.setup({})
vim.keymap.set('n', 'gd', vim.lsp.buf.definition)
vim.keymap.set('n', 'gr', vim.lsp.buf.references)
vim.keymap.set('n', 'K', vim.lsp.buf.hover)
The parts that hurt
Muscle memory is the tax. For the first fortnight my hands did the wrong thing constantly: hitting save shortcuts that didn't exist, trying to select with a mouse, fighting the modal nature of the thing. The trick that helped most was refusing to remap everything to mimic my old editor. If I'd done that I'd have learned nothing and kept all the weaknesses.
The other surprise was how much lives outside the editor now. Fuzzy file finding, grep across the project, jumping between files: a lot of that I do in the terminal or through a finder, not in some monolithic IDE panel. Neovim sits in the middle of that flow rather than trying to be the whole flow.
Where I've landed
I'd say I'm about eighty per cent moved over. The old editor still comes out for big refactors where I want every assist going, and for the odd file type where the tooling isn't there yet. That's fine. The goal was never purity, it was a lighter, faster, more keyboard-driven default that doesn't fight me.
If you're tempted, the advice is dull but it works: switch one task at a time, keep your escape hatch, and don't copy someone else's two-thousand-line config. Build up only what you actually reach for. The slow road is the one that ends with you still using it six months later.