IDEs
When I first began learning to code, I didn’t really understand what an IDE was and I assumed that all of them were more or less the same. This is of course ludicrous because they are all good, except for that one.
Netbeans
My first experience with coding was in a coding bootcamp where I was required to use the same IDE as the instructor, which makes sense. Unfortunately, that meant that I was going to have to learn how to learn netbeans. My first impression was that it was an ugly look, but it worked pretty well. At this point in my career, I didn’t know enough about what to expect from an IDE.
Visual Studio Code
It seems like everyone has had some exposure to Visual Studio Code and it generally seems to be a polarizing IDE. At the time it was a good editor for me. It looked great and allowed me to explore plugins which improved my workflow.
PHP Storm
I work with PHP Storm frequently at my job, so I ended up using PHP Storm. It’s a great editor that has lots of extra features for php development. I remember having my mind blown by having the editor fill in contructors, getters, and setters with one click!
Interest in Terminal Based Development
One of my coworkers gave a presentation on a tool that he was building, and I saw how quickly he moved around in his terminal. I couldn’t believe how efficient he was. I started to try to learn how my terminal for everything that I could. Ironically, I hated the vimtutor which my boss wanted me to try out, but I decided to keep messing around with Vim.
Youtube is an awesome resource for checking out people’s workflow and setup, and I quickly discovered a couple of developers whom I really look up to and learned a lot from. Josean Martinez has a series about configuring Neovim from scratch, which was very influential. Josh Medeski has some really excellent longer videos that show him interviewing different developers about their workflows and it gave me so many awesome ideas of what is possible.
Of course you have to watch the Primagen, did you know he works at Netflix?
Reasons for Diving Into Neovim
- I wanted to become more efficient by using my keyboard and trying not to use the mouse
- I was really sick of having to use the mouse especially to resize windows, move around tabs, and click through a file tree to get a specific file
- Vim seemed like a game that you could get good at and I was craving a challenge
Neovim from scratch
I would not recommend going this route unless you are willing to pour a lot of time into it. I ended up spending hours and hours working to get a custom configuration up and running. Honestly, I loved it. There is something really satisfying with tinkering and customizing a configuration to be set up exactly how you like it, but it could also be really discouraging. If you are wanting to give Neovim a shot, I would recommend starting with a distro or at the very least start with lazy.nvim.