Neovim and the Power of Play

Tom Deneire
7 min readNov 8, 2023
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Why Neovim?

If you use Neovim, like I do, it is not uncommon to have to explain yourself. After all, it is not a very popular choice, as you can see from the 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey:

Integrated development environment (source: Stack Overflow)

Mind you, Neovim’s on the rise with 11.88% of the market share in 2023, which is almost double compared to the year before (6.75%), but you’re still bound to be the exception when you whip out the old nvim … To be completely honest, I’ve never even met another Neovim user in real life. Although, now that I think of it: I apparently live super close to plugin wizard Folke, so I guess I should keep my eyes peeled on the train! 😉

At work, our “official” editor is VSCode, and we’ve even developed a number of custom plugins for syntax highlighting our bespoke file formats and for using our internal deployment system. So when I wanted to switch to Neovim, about a year and half ago, I had to rewrite all of this myself.

So why would you go through so much trouble?

Neovim’s learning curve

It’s true that Neovim has a steep learning curve. First, you have to master Vim motions to effectively…

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Tom Deneire
Tom Deneire

Written by Tom Deneire

Software engineer, technical writer, IT burnout coach @ https://tomdeneire.be/confident_coding

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