VSCode to Neovim

Posted 2021-12-07

I've been using VSCode (technically VSCodium) for a while now, and honestly it's a fantastic tool. I use it daily for many things and do think it's probably one of the best general purpose electron based editors out there. The only real complaints I have are:

It's from Microsoft
Memory usage is starting to get a bit high, especially since I usually have 4 or 5 instances open at a minimum
Despite my best effort, sometimes I still need to reach for my mouse which I am trying to minimize

But since I can't leave well enough alone and I really want to try to shift to a more keyboard slash console based layout, I thought I'd give Neovim a serious try since I haven't really tried to use it for more than basic editing for quite some time.

So I want to try and challenge myself this month to spend the rest of December strictly using Neovim only and trying to not open VSCode at all (unless I need PlatformIO at some point, which is sort of irreplaceable really).

For this first week I'm going to spend most of the time just getting everything working and a good init.lua file setup. The primary plugins I'm using initially setting up are:

packer for my plugin/package manager
nvim-lspconfig Neovim's built in language server client (which has admittedly been a bit complicated to setup)
nvim-cmp for auto-completion
vimspector for debugging of typescript, golang, python and maybe rust
telescope + fzf for fuzzy finding (I looovvee this plugin btw)
nerdtree for my file browser

Originally I explored using coc.vim instead of nvim-cmp but settled on nvim-cmp and Neovim's own language server client, just to give it a try. I may still give CoC a try at some point though.