VIM: Learning journey

Documenting the process of learnig vim after using GUI code editors for 20 years.

Why?

Learn and control of my tools
Having my forever setup
- I changed code editor so many times, i don’t regret it one bit. I learned from all of them but at one point you gotta consolidate

Start with a distro

I started with a distro: I used Lazy and NVChad (this one looks a lot better). I used that for good 3-6 months.

It helped me learn enough lua, the plugin system and the core plugins like Telescope.

Of course the big part was learning the movements. See cheat sheet.

Eventually I moved to my own config based on kickstart.nvim

When I moved out of a distro I did not add all the plugins back. Also decided to change as little of the default keybinding as possible.

While I use my config on my laptop for 90% of the time (and I configure my dotfiles on my servers). When I have to go to a remote instance or conatiner with plain vim I want to be able to be productive on it

Initial set of plugins:

That’s it. Use I used that for 1 or 2 weeks. Yeah, no LSP.

Didn’t add tabs. Used Telescope buffer selection to move between buffers.

I added an LSP but without Mason to install it. I installed it manually to learn how that works.

For example in Typescript:

npm i -D typescript-language-server

Then use lspconfig:

local lspconfig = require("lspconfig")

lspconfig.ts_ls.setup {}

And add a simple indicator to the statusline to show the running LSP.

Also added simple formatting using conform

To have more quality of life and navigation: