As a fairly new dev with only 4yrs of experience, I’ve only used Vscode as my IDE up until now. According to Stack Overflow’s 2023 survey more than 70% of developers uses VS Code and why not? VS Code is the ultimate tool which packs almost everything from LSPs to built in API platform all as a plugin, but this is what makes it bad too
I started using Neovim few months back after seeing most of the chads in programming preferred Vim/Neovim over Vscode which I thought was the best tool any developer can use, but the problem was right there
well even though Vscode offers vast plugin ecosystem it lacked in performance. Late startup, lag in large project, broken LSPs .etc. These are some of what I faced, personally. The integrated terminal had few issues too, and I’ve never liked its collapsible terminal. I want my errors to be perfectly visible in a separate terminal.
Vscode’s integrated git, Obviously it’s Microsoft they’ll only assume you use git and no other source control. Git as a UI is simple, yet it gets complicated as the project gets larger with branches. I’ve at one point had to delete my local folder, clone the project again and re-write the code as I was new to using git other than push, pull etc. and the UI just made it more complex to compare the conflicts between branches.
While Neovim offers plugin ecosystem too but is way performant even in a large project. As a PDE (personalized development environment) Neovim gives me full control to what can I add and remove according to my likings.It’s open source with very good community, and it’s keyboard centered which barely involve mouse.
The switch was hard and one might feel they lost a few things, but I think I want my code editor to be doing exactly like the name says and give a good development experience. There might be a curveball learning vim motions, bindings, configuring, but it makes life so much easier.
So far using Neovim has been a very good experience and I don’t miss Vscode at all.
– nilpointerr