Learning to Like Neovim

After using Emacs for almost 20 years, usually day-in and day-out, I decided to give Neovim a try. I have been using Neovim for two months now, and I can say that I am starting to like it. In this article, I will share my experience of switching from Emacs to Neovim, highlighting the differences, challenges, and benefits I encountered along the way.

Disclaimer: Although my not primary objective, I intend to insult both Vim and Emacs users in this article. I will occassionally insult users of other editors as well. If I do not mention the editor you are using, please do not feel left out: I did not even bother to insult you. I am (not) sorry for that.

This post is not a tutorial, nor a structured comparison of Neovim and Emacs. It merely reflects my personal experience after 2 months of using Neovim. I may write a more structured article after I have more experience with Neovim.

My Journey with Emacs and Other Editors

I have been programming for more than 20 years and have used many different editors. Two of them stood out: Emacs and Vim.

Emacs has been my daily driver since about late 2004. I have used it for many purposes. You may have heard such stories before, but let me share what is relevant for this article: I used Emacs as an email client (Gnus) for more than 5 years until 2011, as a web browser (w3m) for a while, as a file manager occasionally, and as my music player before Spotify took over my life.

I have also used Vim, but usually for quick edits and mostly on remote servers.

For large projects, I almost always used IDEs. I have used Netbeans, Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, Atom, and Visual Studio Code enough to talk about them. Yet, I always returned to Emacs for my smaller projects, or for projects involving R, Lisp, LaTeX, etc.

About 2 years ago, after a few years of working with Visual Studio Code, I switched to Emacs entirely, thanks to the LSP mode, to work on large Haskell, Python, and TypeScript projects. I was quite happy with it. TypeScript development was a bit clunky, but it was even clunkier with Visual Studio Code anyway.

I have to say that configuring was always a pain with Emacs. Over the years, I declared "Emacs Config Bankruptcy" a few times and started from scratch. After switching to NixOS, I adopted emacs-overlay that has built-in support for literate programming with Org mode for Emacs configuration. It was bliss.

Why I Decided to Switch

I was happy with Emacs. Indeed, I am still happy with it.

Let me put it this way: My litmus test for picking a new tool or technology is imagining myself using it in my retirement days. Emacs passes this test almost perfectly.

My switch to Neovim happened for two main, but coincidental reasons:

Firstly, after I switched to Emacs as an IDE, I convinced my friend and colleague Ali to depart from Visual Studio Code and switch to either Emacs or Neovim. He had experience with both, and he chose Neovim as I anticipated he would: He is young and pragmatic. He can be quite pedantic, too, but in the end, he was quite happy with his setup. You will see why this matters soon.

Secondly, I was working on a Haskell project where I was aggressively refactoring the codebase, just 2 months ago. But suddenly, I bumped into a possible bug that rendered my LSP rename functionality unusable. I was quite frustrated.

Without much thought, I decided to give Neovim a try. So, it was not premeditated.

How I Switched to Neovim

First, I ran my litmus test: Can I imagine myself using Neovim in my retirement days? How does it play with NixOS? Is there a decent community around it? Is it actively developed? Do I like Lua as a configuration language?

All checked.

However, I realized that I did not have time to configure Neovim from scratch. But I knew Ali had a decent configuration. Ali and I share our NixOS configurations with each other. I also had the luxury of asking him questions about his Neovim setup.

So, I took his Neovim configuration, made a few small changes, activated my new NixOS configuration, and continued where I left off.

First Impressions of Neovim

I was quite happy with Neovim. It was fast, snappy, and responsive.

The keybindings, however, were a challenge. Because (I guess) I marked Neovim as the system-wide $EDITOR, my zsh keybindings switched to vim keybindings. That was even more frustrating!

But I was so busy with my project that I did not even bother to play with my configuration any further.

Also quite funny: Many things are missing compared to my Emacs setup. I have 16 GitHub issues on my NixOS configuration repository dedicated to my Neovim setup. There is an LSP bug that makes me exit and re-enter Neovim at least once every other day. However, I am quite happy with it, and I am simply ignoring these issues for now.

Comparison to Emacs

Emacs is an operating system. Vi(m), in the spirit of ed, is a program that adheres well to Unix Philosophy. Neovim is a program that tries to be a bit more than Vim and significantly less than Emacs.

I can confidently say these things:

1. Neovim is faster and more responsive than Emacs.
2. Neovim is pretty much as configurable and extensible as Emacs, as far as I am concerned.
3. I can launch many instances of Neovim for different projects, but Emacs is too heavy for that, and its frame-based multi-project support did not work well for me.
4. I love Lisp, but the lack of namespaces in Elisp is a pain. I am happy to use Lua for my Neovim configuration.
5. Neovim has a much bigger and more vibrant community than Emacs.

These are all good points.

But at the same time, I find Neovim plugins to be of lesser quality than Emacs plugins on average. This is not a big deal, and it is actually quite normal and even expected: If there are more people writing plugins for Neovim, there will be more people with less programming experience as well. Programmers gain experience over time. These plugins will just get better. The only challenge is to pick your plugins wisely.

One important thing to mention here is the keybindings. Somehow, I had the impression that Emacs had much more coherent keybinding maps compared to Vim. The more I use Neovim, the more I am convinced that this is not necessarily true. I am quite happy with Neovim's keybindings. In fact, sometimes I figure out keybindings myself without even looking at the documentation.

Changes to My Productivity and Workflows

I can not say that I am more productive with Neovim. But I am pretty sure that I am not less productive either.

As for my workflow, I find it quite convenient to quickly launch a new Neovim instance on a random tmux pane and start hacking.

I do not like the idea of using servers like workstations. But we have some servers where we occasionally need to do some work. I am quite happy to use Neovim on these servers. All our NixOS servers even have Neovim configured with a subset of Ali's configuration. This is definitely a plus in terms of convenience and productivity.

What I Miss from Emacs

Actually, this question is not really relevant for me. By now, I know that I can do almost everything I did with Emacs in Neovim.

My answer is, therefore, I miss all the things that I had configured in Emacs and have not had time to configure in Neovim yet.

Maybe I just miss the keybindings?! I am not sure. I started liking Neovim's modal editing.

Going Forward

Neovim is a great editor. I see myself using it for a while now. So far, my only investment in it has been learning the keybindings and a few concepts. Yet, I am fully functional on it.

At some point, I will revisit my Neovim configuration and adapt it to my needs as I am used to doing with Emacs. Only then will I be able to tell if I am really so happy with Neovim that I can finally delete my Emacs configuration (which I do not need to do anyway).

One thing is for sure; I do not see myself using an editor packed into Electron (no Visual Studio Code or a fork of it, like cursor).

Still, I am open to new advancements in the field of text editors. I am keeping an eye on Kakoune, Helix and Zed, for example.