Around 2 years ago, I started using vim. I was influenced by a friend, who looked so cool and blazingly fast with it.
After learning the basic vim motions and getting comfortable with them, I wanted to use vim for everything. And that’s when I learned about neovim. It offered more functionality and plugins, and made the terminal editing experience feel like an IDE.
I copied over some configs and plugins from people on the internet, and I was a happy neovim user. I just edited my files blazingly fast, and I even got comments from people at the office. They don’t expect a gen z to be a vim user.
A few weeks ago, I updated neovim and it broke my plugins. They don’t load and it’s been mildly annoying not having some of the features and conveniences I used to. I don’t know how to fix it, because my configuration is just copy-pasted from other people’s. So my todo list has had a “learn neovim” ever since it broke. But it just hasn’t been that much of an issue.
I haven’t been using neovim as my main editor for progrmaming purposes for a while now. It’s been replaced by LLM integrated IDEs and terminal-based AI applications such as Claude Code. No matter how blazingly-fast I move with vim motions and type away at 140WPM, I’m no faster than an LLM.
I’ve continued to use vim motions on all my IDEs, and I still use neovim the text editor on a daily basis. But now its for making quick edits to code, or for writing and editing text files.
So I can no longer say “I use neovim (btw)”. But I will continue to flex my vim motions whenever I can.