Working in VIM Feels Like Gaming

I know that Vim and Neovim have diverged in important ways, but I don’t really think of them as separate programs, but rather as different interfaces for the same core system, sort of like Ubuntu and Kubuntu: under the hood it feels like home.

So although I’m a Neovimmer and am getting more comfortable with Lua, I’ll happily use Vim if I’m on a remote machine.

Once upon a time, I wrote all my scripts in gedit because it had syntax highlighting and bracket completion, and I thought “What more does a man need?” Then I started learning to code:

Atom --> Sublime --> VS Code --> IntelliJ --> Neovim

Eventually, I came to Vim and specifically Neovim for much the same reasons as everyone else: speed, lightness, configurability, extensibility, and keyboard-centricity.

I got over the standard performance hit and have never looked back. Once in a while I use nano in SSH and sometimes gedit makes sense, but if Vim or Neovim is installed on a machine, even completely vanilla, it has such advanced features by default that it’s all I need for scripting and editing configuration files.

In short, using Vim makes me happy :)