Get Your Friends to Start Using Neovim
Neovim can speak for itself, here's what you can showcase.
Why not have more and more people using and contributing to the best editor out there?
What I am not suggesting is having an editor war at your work and to the “victor go the spoils”. I think that the capabilities, flexibility, and power of Neovim speaks for itself after you get past figuring out how to exit Vim 😂.
Everyone should use the editor of their choice but certainly if you show your friends all the cool plugins and ways you can quickly edit code or text inside Neovim, they will want to know more.
Here are a few of the benefits I try to highlight when showing someone Neovim or when pairing with them:
Extensibility
Each indivdual person has the ability to customize Neovim to their own liking almost to infinite.
Here is one of my favorite videos talking about that Extensibility and the power of how that plays into the community:
This is why the term Personal Development Environment (PDE) is sometimes used to describe Neovim since you can customize shortcuts, plugins, default behavior, etc.
For example, if you like using a directory tree explorer similar to other editors, reach for Neotree. If you want to explore alternatives like Ranger or Oil.nvim then you can go that route.
I am personally biased but to each their own!
You have the ability to customize the bottom bar using lualine or not have one at all!
You can change the keybindings for opening a buffer, searching, the world is your oyster.
With all the possibilities, someone can get overwhelmed quickly so I typically suggest someone starting with either KickstartNvim or a distribution like LazyVim where some choices have been made for you.
From there you can start to explore and engage with the community to see what all the possibilities and options are.
Write your own plugin
If you want truly customized experience you can write your own plugin! Lua is a very friendly language (just remember arrays start at 1!).
Learn Lua in 15 Minutes
Two dashes start a one-line comment. --[[ Adding two ['s and ]'s makes it a multi-line comment. --]]…tylerneylon.com
Here’s an example plugin you could drop into your configuration today:
local plugin = {}
function plugin.hello()
vim.message('Hello, world!')
end
vim.keymap.set('n', '<leader>h', plugin.hello)
return plugin
That’s it! You have now written your own plugin and you can extend it to use external programs, manipulate text, display windows, anything you’d like!
Precision of Editing
What I have grown to love with Neovim is the ability to be precise in how I edit files.
Instead of using the mouse to click or scroll up / down, I can do a search for a word, edit that single instance or all instances using macros, multiline cursors, or regex.
Instead of holding left or right arrow you can jump to a character using f or F (e.g. ft;
) and modify just that block of text. Clearing from your cursor to the end of the line is a single key with C
or D
.
It takes some getting used to and gaining the muscle memory but once you get over the initial hurdle you can truly fly through editing a file and manipulate text quickly.
This lets you be much faster than using a mouse and your hands do not need to even leave the home row.
If I want to change some text across multiple projects, I can do that within Neovim with ease.
If I need to quickly open a file from a remote server or open a webpage in the browser, all those keybindings are in my editor.
Have a conversation with an Ollama LLM right from my editor? No problem, fire up :Gen
and ask away (from https://github.com/David-Kunz/gen.nvim).
Fun
If you enjoy tinkering then you will likely have a LOT of fun tinkering with your editor and will learn a LOT about the command line and become more comfortable with running scripts and commands in your terminal.
You could write a plugin to pipe error messages through cowsay if you really wanted. Have some fun with your editor!
The community around Neovim is really helpful and encouraging for people just starting to get into using it and I hope it continues to stay this way.
Just remember to get some actual work done and NOT just rice on your Neovim config all day.
Conclusion
In summary, I don’t think you need any special pitches or guilting to get
others to try out Neovim. Simply showing them some of the benefits and giving options and being someone they can ask questions of when they are curious or get stuck with their own personal exploration is best. Neovim doesn’t have to be the editor for everyone but certainly it is a great one for folks that want to invest in their craft, learn something cool, and aren’t afraid of trying out something new. Thanks for reading, let me know if you have gotten friends to try out Neovim and what their feedback was!