I have a pretty decent Neovim setup — I’m using LazyVim, I’ve got a bunch of customizations that I’ve made and I’ve installed several plugins and LSPs. When I initially set it up from scratch, I would say I spent a good 7–8 hours. Maybe more. I love vim motions, I love that I can just stay in the terminal when I want to make changes to a file, no need to jump to an editor. I love that it feels crazy fast and that it’s super-lightweight. I love the culture of Neovim — custom keyboards, open source software, and the feeling of superiority that comes with using Neovim.
But sometimes I just prefer using VSCode. Like the other day, I wanted to fix a bug in a friend’s Wordpress site that I built a couple years ago. I opened the project folder with Neovim and started looking through the code. When I tried to peek the definition of a function by pressing leader k, I couldn’t get the modal to go away with out clicking on the screen. Maybe that’s a skill issue but, like, if escape doesn’t work and neither does Ctrl+c, I’m out. I don’t give a fuck, I’m not looking it up. And if it’s a bug and I need to install the latest update, fuck that. I don’t want to look up how do that again.
I’m looking shit up all goddamn day for my job, you know? I don’t want to spend time looking up how to do something in my editor. Now the thing is, in this case, I didn’t open up VSCode. I just couldn’t even be bothered to do that so I just fixed the bug in my maybe broken editor that I can’t use very well because I don’t usually use it to edit PHP files so…
I can hear Prime saying “Dude you have to learn your editor before you write a post like this. How much time did you spend customizing and learning VSCode back when you were using it more often?” And that’s true. In fact, when I was fixing the bug, I tried to go to the definition of a function with gd and I had forgotten to press leader first. And I was annoyed and of course it was just a skill issue.
But, like, I bought a little 40 key columnar layout mechanical keyboard and put some better key caps on it and tried using it with the layers and stuff for a while. And I liked it, I like the linear switches, the blank keycaps, the non-staggered keyboard layout… but I gave up on it. I was so stoked to nerd out on that shit and buy a fucking $400 keyboard or build my own… and then I just realized what a distraction that is. I want to get better at building shit and deploying shit. I want to get more into things that might actually be useful to people. Spending time learning things that are custom, non-portable, and expensive is just not a smart move for me.
What editor did Ryan Dahl use to build Node? What kind of keyboard does he use?? What about John Carmack? How many monitors does he use??? I wonder if he ever tried Dvorak. Should I learn Dvorak? Or maybe Workman?
It’s like hey, I have an idea, how about you fucking just open up any fucking editor and work on that list of projects you keep talking about? Build that next app you’ve been putting off. Finish that Go book you’re working on. Learn Ansible. Get that AWS cert. Why not? Cause that sounds hard and you’d rather buy shit and play with expensive toys?
I use Obsidian. I like it a lot. And I’m always tempted to deep dive into reorganizing my setup, try a new PKM system, start using more plugins, fiddle with things, customize… and the thing is that people who spend all their time doing that shit are just avoiding actual work. They don’t enjoy whatever it is they should be doing, so they spend time doing this instead because it feels productive.
But real productivity is just waking up, putting on some pants, making a cup of coffee and then sitting down at your desk eager to jump into your actual work. And then working for like 4 hours until you’re like “oh shit I should eat something.” If you can get paid to fiddle with your Neovim config, more power to you. But I’d rather spend my time on something more useful.