Zen and the Art of Neovim

Learning about your machines

The whole Neovim culture is pretty funny. Primeagen, TJ DeVries, and all of them are pretty hilarious to follow on youtube and hear their takes on dev culture while watching them zip through their coding workflows on livestream.

While I still switch back and forth with VSCode, forcing myself to use Neovim for my hobby projects has generally made me more confident in my understanding of computers. Who knew that customizing your own dev environment could teach you so much about your machine?

While it’s cool to see everyone vibe-coding with Cursor, Lovable, Windsurf, v0, and all of the other AI-coding IDE’s, a part of me thinks that the current phase of AI-coding is pretty ephemeral, as you’ll commonly read about AI coding agents struggling to build meaningful features once code bases start to grow larger.

Additionally, I think in an AI world where everything is given to you fast and cheap, you have to find ways to signal to your brain that you are a little bit more serious, a little bit more hardcore than the next person using AI to code.

But who knows, maybe I’m just hating from the sidelines as I’m not really trying those tools out for now.

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I’ve primarily specialized in data engineering (think data-warehousing, data pipelines, analytics, SQL, etc.) before I started messing with ChatGPT, Claude, etc. for coding in 2023.

To be honest, I actually don’t feel that more productive with my use of Neovim compared to VSCode. But I know that my learning rate about computers has gone way up over the past few months as I’ve started to use Neovim.

When you first start off with Neovim and vim motions, the struggle will make you feel completely inept at programming. You have to watch tutorials, you have to lookup shortcuts, you have to come up with your own workarounds to do what you want to do. Probably all things that veteran devs might say, “Back in my day… we used to…", before the advent of AI.

But it’s almost as if it’s this way on purpose.

You pay attention to how you are struggling, you figure out what key-binds you like and don’t like, you think about what actions you use most often and how you can make them easier, and you dream up creative scripts for parts of your workflow that you find yourself repeating.

Using Neovim is knowing that you have complete creative freedom with your computer and your workflows, and I think it is worth it for anyone getting into the game to spend a season playing around with their own Neovim config.

The broader lesson in all of this is, if you want to to take your craft more seriously, find out what the most hardcore people are doing, go deep inside in the hood of the tools you are using, and figure out ways to make your workflows your own.

I may laugh at this post a year from now and become another AI-IDE power-user, but for now, I’m happy that I’ve had my season.