Advent of Neovim: Why Neovim?

Summary

In this engaging introduction to the Advent of Neovim series, TJ DeVries dives into the reasons why he chooses to use Neovim, a highly configurable text editor that's winning hearts among developers. The video explains how customizing Neovim helps eliminate daily annoyances and allows users to have software that truly works for them. DeVries walks viewers through the process of downloading, building, and installing Neovim from scratch, emphasizing its open-source nature and high flexibility. Viewers also get a sneak peek into basic operations in Neovim, laying the groundwork for more in-depth explorations in subsequent videos.

Highlights

• Dive into Neovim to turn daily annoyances into thrills of customization! 🎨
• Discover how easy it is to install and build Neovim yourself! 🚀
• Neovim celebrates open-source advantages, no hidden AI agendas! 🎉
• Start simple with Neovim’s basics and grow your skills incrementally! 🌱

Key Takeaways

• Customizing Neovim minimizes daily annoyances and boosts productivity. 😊
• Installing Neovim from scratch is super easy and flexible. 🛠️
• Neovim's open-source nature offers transparency and freedom. 🌍
• Basic Neovim operations pave the way for mastering advanced functionalities. 📚

Overview

Starting the journey into Neovim, TJ DeVries isn't just teaching about a text editor; he's showcasing a customizable world where daily annoyances can transform into satisfying victories. Imagine tweaking a software to suit your personal quirks—Neovim makes this possible! From small annoyances to a tool that sings to your tune, this series promises to enlighten and inspire.

Easing into Neovim, DeVries shows us just how straightforward it is to get going with this platform. He emphasizes building and installing it yourself for maximum flexibility—creating an open-source haven without external pressures. This approach not only enhances understanding but also keeps things transparent and adaptable.

As the series progresses, viewers are equipped with the building blocks of using Neovim—entering and exiting modes, writing and executing scripts are just the start. This foundational knowledge primes enthusiasts for deeper dives into the sea of Neovim possibilities, where each custom configuration is a step closer to a personalized coding paradise.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Advent of Neovim In the introduction to Advent of Neovim, the speaker outlines the journey from starting with a blank, uninstalled Neovim to achieving a fully configured version. Over 25 videos, each aspect of configuring Neovim will be explained, aiming to create a personalized version similar to Kickstart while incorporating unique ideas and preferences. The speaker expresses hopes that viewers will appreciate the personalized approach.
• 00:30 - 02:00: Why Use Neovim? In this chapter, the speaker discusses their personal reasons for using Neovim. They clarify that the intention isn't to persuade others to use Neovim, as the viewers likely already have an interest in it by choosing to watch the video. Instead, the focus is on sharing individual motivations, such as enjoying the process of writing personal configurations, which is more satisfying for them than using pre-made solutions. The speaker mentions that personal happiness takes precedence over convincing others.
• 02:00 - 05:00: Customizing and Building Neovim The chapter focuses on the customization and building of Neovim, emphasizing the satisfaction that comes from making things function according to personal preferences.
• 05:00 - 10:00: Getting Started with Neovim Configurations This chapter delves into the initial steps of configuring Neovim, emphasizing the dual aspects of enjoyment in customizing and the practical aspect of minimizing daily annoyances. The chapter reflects on how minor irritations, when repeatedly encountered throughout the day, can disproportionately affect one's daily experience, highlighting the value of a well-tuned Neovim setup in enhancing productivity and satisfaction.

Advent of Neovim: Why Neovim? Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hello and welcome to Advent of neovim we're going to start off with a blank uninstalled neovim and move all the way up to having a fully configured neovim throughout this Advent we'll release 25 separate little videos explaining each little aspect along the way we'll end up with something approximately around Kickstart if you're familiar with that but it'll have its own sort of few ideas and things that are more personalized to the way I like it I hope you like this
• 00:30 - 01:00 series and we'll just go ahead and get started so the first thing is why why do I use neovim I'm not going to try and convince you to use neoven you already clicked on the video so I'm assuming you have some interest in learning it but in general I don't think proz Technologies is a super productive use of my time I'd rather write my own configs you might think that that's a waste of time but at least it makes me happy convincing you to use neovim does not so instead what we'll do is I'll just give you some of the reasons that I like using new of
• 01:00 - 01:30 them and maybe some of them will resonate with you and if not that's totally fine you can go watch Prime read instead of this so I find it super satisfying to make things do exactly what I want them to do we're going to show in this video that it's actually super easy to download build and install neovim in approximately a minute and so you could even go so far as very easily changing and customizing neovim itself now might be annoying to keep the patches up and all this other stuff but that's the level of flexibility that we have have when we're exploring with
• 01:30 - 02:00 neoven I also find sort of the flip side of this there's the hacking side which is in itself fun but there's also the eliminating annoying things and I don't know if you're like me little annoying things have sort of an outsized impact on my day-to-day experiences right if I have to do something over and over that I really don't like doing it bothers me and you know this is sort of a character flaw but bothers me more than it really
• 02:00 - 02:30 should so using neovim and allowing sort of this Avenue for me to turn those annoyances into either things that I think are cool that I've sort of conquered or things that I no longer think about because we've completely automated them that's a really valuable thing for the long-term health of my development now yeah Mr YouTuber talking about my development I still write code believe it or not and I want to keep writing code for a long time uh and the last little bit here is like the whole modal editing thing which we'll cover uh
• 02:30 - 03:00 in one of the first few days here of Advent of neovin it really clicks with my brain instead of having huge key sort of like chords or other things like this we just can use a language to describe how we want to interact with the editor which is what text objects and verbs and actions really are is sort of like a little mini language that you can learn to communicate with it really clicks with my brain and works really well so there's a few other reasons too I like that it's properly open source I like
• 03:00 - 03:30 there's no secret uh incentives to try and get you to buy into Cloud platforms or AI tooling you know stuff along these lines but those are sort of secondary aspects and definitely not the primary motivators of how I got into and why I was using neovim I do remember the very first time that I found out neovim existed I was a I think college senior at the time and I found out that you could write Python and it could change what was happening inside of your editor and that blew my mind at the time all I
• 03:30 - 04:00 had really experienced Eclipse that was it that was it I was pretty much used to clips and that was all so I was really Blown Away by neovim uh and that sort of stumbled me into a long path of now apparently you know making YouTube videos and streaming and doing other Stu so that's sort of why I use it maybe those make sense to you maybe they don't but that's kind of the general idea so how are we going to get started well you have to get neim that's the first thing uh
• 04:00 - 04:30 pretty easy you can go to the neovim website here and it's got a bunch of different options uh Linked In the description for these slides as well and you can click install but personally I really think building NE from source is the way to go and it's pretty easy so you can just uh make sure you install the build prerequisites that's kind of an important bit but if you've done that you could go to something like here and just clone this in I'm just going to do depth one just so that we can clone this quickly we'll go back to here and says Hey CD in the
• 04:30 - 05:00 neovim and make it okay cool that's nice so now we're making neovim and keep in mind this is downloading a bunch of external dependencies and pulling all of these in and all that good stuff and it's still going to be very fast we'll just we'll give it a second uh but the reason that I'm showing this is because if you understand how this works you can really easily you know check out different tags or different versions or get the latest version or roll back your version all of those things are super easy if you start to understand how to
• 05:00 - 05:30 build this for yourself uh and of course later you know then you could look at like how does the Lua LSP work inside of here okay we can do this right so that's great so now we've built it uh or and now we just need to download or uh install it here so we can install this and now this would be installed and I already have neovim obviously on my machine but this would be building and installing again and so this is a complete from scratch build these are much faster if you do this later because you've already downloaded all the external dependencies
• 05:30 - 06:00 but there you go basically within a minute you can have the latest neovim and it's even faster once you want to update that for yourself so that's the very beginning part here the next thing we want to note is uh hey what are you going to do how do you start doing anything inside of the editor so if you're on Linux or Mac this is uh in config envm and N Lua and it's some similar thing in Windows I don't know I've never done that and so here we go we can do we can open our neovim and I'm
• 06:00 - 06:30 actually going to do just a little bit of a a little bit of a trick here I would say which is we can make an envm app name and we'll just call this um exam we'll call it envm example and we'll open neovim and now this is basically a fresh and clean neovim uh this envm app name is a trick for those of you who are a bit professionals or have some uh you know maybe some other configs to completely separate your neovim configs if you're trying to uh test out different ideas so this has literally nothing inside of it so for
• 06:30 - 07:00 you you would go to CD config envm I'm going to go to envm example that doesn't exist yet so we'll make it Mak enm example CD into here and this is what you would do if you had the same thing and now we can do envm app name here and we'll edit anit Lua you'll just run envm anit Lua if you're in the correct directory for you okay sweet now we can do something like print hello world or maybe hello we'll say Advent of neovim now you might be saying okay okay I just
• 07:00 - 07:30 opened neoven for the first time I don't know how to do anything good point you can press I to go to insert mode okay you'll see how it says insert in the bottom left right now then you can start typing just like you would normally okay we'll explain a little bit more of this in the next day but you can start typing just type the way you would of neovim here okay and when you're done typing in insert mode you can press Escape or contrl C or we'll write remaps for that later for those of you who don't have you know sick dactyl manuform orino keyboard
• 07:30 - 08:00 and then once you're back in that you're no longer in insert mode so now you're in normal mode and interestingly it's called normal mode because this is where you'll normally be spending your time and that's maybe a little bit different from some of the ideas that maybe used to but that's totally okay and once you've done that you'll see this little plus sign this means hey you've got changes that aren't saved this is where maybe you would be confused because you're saying where's my save button or why isn't an Autos saving we'll get to those eventually but uh we need to send a command the way
• 08:00 - 08:30 that we tell NE of them how to do commands is we type a Col in you'll see now we have this little colon and we're right down here and we can just type right now or just W but WR at first will kind of give you what you're doing and see how that goes away and it tells you that it was written and now we can do this little quit great if I open the of them up again you'll see hey we printed that line twice because that's what we printed if we want to delete this line we can just tap D twice DD that deletes it we'll write again and then we will
• 08:30 - 09:00 quit Okay and when we open neovim again like this we'll see in messages Advent of neovim awesome so that's basically everything we want I wanted to cover in this first round right which is just how do we do this the last little tidbit is you're saying okay I want to start writing some of my own code I don't really want to restart completely every single time well that's pretty easy too the way that we can do this is if we open this up we can do source percent
• 09:00 - 09:30 percent is sort of like a placeholder for this current file and we can see that we wrote this if we write something here again by saying hello and we Source percent it's going to run this whole file top to bottom one thing that's cool though is if we want to visually select something like once again you just relax don't worry we'll cover visual selections later right now just do something like shift V to visually select this line we press col in again to send us into command mode and write
• 09:30 - 10:00 Lua this will actually just run what we've selected so if we select these and we just do Lua only the two lines that we're running will get executed but this is pretty cool too because you could do something like and relax we'll get here uh my cool function is function you know print hello and like this and if we select this we could Now call my cool function and it will print hello so all of that is sort of the very very basics
• 10:00 - 10:30 of how we can start editing uh text inside of neoven by going into insert mode escaping back to normal mode writing and quitting tomorrow we'll take our next step on our neovim journey if you think this is a cool video if you don't mind the random rants in the middle let me know in the comments I'm going to try out something different and hope you all enjoy it thanks everybody I'll see you later