Starting with neovim

As I started writing this post in neovim today, after hustling a little bit with package management and neovim configuration, I remembered what it was like learn computer things when I was a kid. It was a rather tedious process, with a lot of trial and error but it never felt tedious. That is probably because I had no reference to compare it against. In comparison, now I have a lot of weigh this experience against. Being employed full time as a software developer I can be rather productive with modern tools like IDEs etc. So naturally every time I am trying to figure out anything around neovim, I am finding it rather tedious. It's a little bit like going uphill on a bike, I feel like I need to go faster even though I am within my normal cadence of riding a bike.

Neovim feels like an arcane piece of technology. It reminds me of a time when I used to write BASIC in GW-BASIC; with it's integrated interpreter (if I can call it that) where we would also write and edit code in. In GW-BASIC one had to load a bit of code, and to edit, one had to go to a specific line to re-enter the whole line. It was slow and in retrospect, tedious but it was fun!

And maybe I will find myself enjoying the process, as I did almost 20 years ago.

0026 Hours - update from the next day

I picked up my old 2014 MacBook Pro, started the NixOS distrubution that I had neglected to set up some time ago and started working on setting up the NixOS as my developer machine. I decided all the work I will be doing in terms of editing Nix files, I will be doing with neovim, and I realised I am already enjoying neovim! I am yet to configure all the language specific tool, but I guess all that can wait.

I have yet to learn search and replace, code folding, code hints and all of that... but I am happy about the journey ahead.

17-04-2024