As I wrote earlier, I skipped over neovim initially, but then got curious.

I installed Neovim and configured it to use Lazyvim.

I was blown away by how nice it is.

My last serious affair with neovim was two years ago. ¹

Lot has changed since then.

Lazyvim wasn’t even born when I stopped using neovim ²

It is quite polished.³ The hotekys are mnemonic and intuitive (coming from doom emacs, at least)

I have not used it a lot.

When working on large(ish) code files, sometimes it is easier to fold rest of the code from that file and focus on one “block” at a time.

I use the word “block” because based on the context, it means different things. It could be as big as a class (if the file contains multiple classes) or as small as a if-else block.

But this functionality is not always turned on.

NvChad is yet another neovim starter kit.

Creator of NvChad is on the VimUser’s Telegram Group. So I was intrigued to try NvChad. (I had tried it a while ago, but decided to visit it later. That “later” is now)

One of the plugin I use is Telekasten. It reminds me of Dendron, another tool I used to use (requires VSCode, which I consider too heavy. But Dendron now works without VScode as well. Also, “daily notes” is just one of the features of Dendron. That is the feature I use with Telekasten)

In my tour of Neovim starter kits, I landed on SpaceVim

I started my Emacs journey with Spacemacs, and used it for couple of years before settling on Doom Emacs.

Spacemacs inspired SpaceVim.

I had liked the mnenomic keybindings in Spacemacs (and now in SpaceVim)

But Spacevim is different from how other starter kits handle configuration.

Last week, I tried DoomVim (inspired by Doom Emacs) and NVChad (and “Neovim from scratch” by same folks as LunarVim) They all had similar configuration, based on lua

Today I discovered that I can open a nice floating Terminal in the middle of the screen by pressing Ctrl+\

Thanks to toggleterm plugin.

Earlier I used to use :terminal command, which would open a terminal in another tab. I had to switch tabs to use the terminal and going back to editing the files.

With toggleterm I press Ctrl+\, do my terminal tasks, and toggle it again to send it the background. (At least that is what I think happens, since next time I summon it, I can continue where I left off, not a new shell.)

I’ve started watching this YouTube playlist Neovim from scratch

It is a great learning resource.

I use a program called espanso for hotkey expansion across the OS, that has emoji completion option. But it does not work with Vim. Maybe because of modal editing 🤷

While it took me some time to figure out, setting it up is quite straight forward.

1. Install the plugin. Add the following ‘~/.config/nvim/lua/user/plugins.lua’ file use "hrsh7th/cmp-emoji" -- Markdown emoji (Search for -- cmp plugins in the file)

On the Vim Telegram group, I came across this starter kit called Neovim from scratch

But this starter kit is different from others. Others are opinionated (with a good reason). This one seems like purpose built.

Purpose being - to teach the users what goes under the hood. So it comes with a YouTube series.

But ones doesn’t need to follow the YouTube series to use this. One can just clone the git repo and get going.

Today I spent some time getting projectile equivalent working with LunarVim

At first I went with builtin/core plugin projects.nvim. Enabling it was quite straight forward. I wasn’t sure how to add new project.

Then I tried telescope-projects. Even here I could not add new project (Per their documentation, it is Ctrl-a in Insert mode, and just c in normal mode) But I just opened the project root I wanted to work on, and it got added to the list of projects.

Once I got Neovide working with LunarVim, I realized that I had not updated LunarVim for a long time.

I was already in rolling branch, so I did git pull origin rolling

Big mistake.

Things broke.

After RTFM, I noticed that there is :LvimUpdate command in LunarVim.

But by this time, my config was so broken that nothing worked 😞

Luckily, I found the old instructions that helped me initially.

Following those instructions, I was able to get “up and running”

So I tried VimR for some time, but it always felt odd. Sure all the LunarVim keybindings worked. But VimR wasn’t just Neovim client. It comes with its own features like the side panes for Files, Buffers, Markdown etc.

Also, it won’t really quit. :q! would destroy the window, but it would remain in the dock.

So for main work, I used Emacs.

Then today in Doom Emacs Telegram group, someone started talking about Vim. After some time, I ended up subscribing to Vim Telegram group, and asked about better neovim GUI.