About a year into my Neovim journey, and I'm still reaching for it every morning. Not because I'm stubborn (well, maybe a little), but because it genuinely makes me enjoy coding more. Sure, there's VS Code with its slick UI and Cursor with its AI magic, but here's the thing - all of those features can be replicated in Neovim, and then customized exactly how you want them.

Most people see two massive hurdles: learning vim motions and setting everything up from scratch. Fair enough - they're real barriers. But once you get past them, they become the very reasons you'll never want to leave.

Moving like you think

Remember when you first tried vim and thought "who the hell designed this?" HJKL for navigation, no mouse, everything feels backwards. I definitely had that moment. Spent weeks feeling like I was coding with oven mitts on.

But then something clicked. The editing commands started making sense - d for delete, c for change, y for yank. Your fingers start remembering patterns. ci" to change inside quotes, dap to delete around a paragraph. It stops being about memorizing commands and becomes about expressing what you want to do.

The speed thing everyone talks about? Honestly, that's not the point. It's more about staying in flow. When you can edit text as fast as you think about it, you don't get pulled out of your train of thought by clunky interactions.

Building your own lightsaber

Here's where Neovim gets interesting - it ships as basically a text editor with potential. No fancy autocomplete, no git integration, no file tree. Just raw editing power waiting for you to shape it.

This terrifies beginners and delights tinkerers. I fall firmly in the second camp.

With tools like lazy.nvim and the Lua ecosystem, setting up Neovim has become surprisingly pleasant. You're not fighting arcane config files anymore - you're building something that fits exactly how you work.

Want that sleek VS Code file explorer? There's nvim-tree. Need AI autocompletion like Cursor? Supermaven or Copilot work beautifully. Fancy UI elements? You've got telescope, lualine, and a whole ecosystem of plugins that can make Neovim look however you want.

My setup knows that when I hit <space>ff, I want to find files. <space>e toggles my file explorer. gd jumps to definitions. These aren't arbitrary mappings - they're extensions of how I think about navigating code.

And honestly? I'm constantly tweaking it. New plugin catches my eye? I'm trying it out. Found a better way to organize my keymaps? I'm refactoring the whole thing. Some people set up their config once and forget about it, but for me, tinkering with Neovim is half the fun. It's like having a hobby that directly improves your work.

The terminal is home

There's something satisfying about doing everything in the terminal. While others are alt-tabbing between their editor, terminal, and browser, I'm living in tmux sessions where everything flows together.

My Neovim sits alongside running servers, git operations, and build processes. No context switching, no separate applications fighting for screen real estate. Just one cohesive workspace where the keyboard rules everything.

This setup has made me more comfortable with command-line tools in general. When your editor is terminal-native, you naturally start reaching for grep, sed, and all the other Unix tools that make development more powerful.

This workflow feels lightweight and efficient to me. No Electron apps eating RAM, no vendor lock-in, just tools that do exactly what they say they do.

Neovim still surprises me. Not with flashy features, but with how well it gets out of my way and lets me focus on what matters - writing good code.