A while back, I had a funny experience during an interview process. As I finished up one interview exercise and headed to another, I was met with the words “You’re the guy without the mouse?” I didn’t really understand what he meant without further explanation. He went on to explain that after the initial setup of the pair programming exercise, the previous interviewer, whom I had just left, typed into his team’s Slack channel along the lines of “Just interviewed a grad that did the three server setup without touching his mouse. Full Neovim and tmux setup. Did I just get flexed on?”

I found it more humorous than prideful. Proficiency with Neovim and Tmux isn’t a strong indicator of a developer’s skill, and I’m not an expert user of those tools. I know some of the best Devs that work in a completely vanilla VSCode setup. I know some people who hail Cursor as the new age of programming. But since watching others use Neovim and creating my own environment, I’ve developed a strong affinity for it. There’s no single reason to use Neovim other than that it makes development feel like an addictive game you get better at as you learn more and make an effort to improve.

Whether it’s telescope, the vim motions themselves, or the lsp integration. The same feeling I get from yanking a line and pasting it below, then jumping to the third word to remove and replace it faster than I ever could conceivably do with arrow keys, is akin to the same feeling I used to get from getting a one-tap in CS:GO (RIP) or a forced checkmate in Chess. It’s a feeling that you have gained competency in an area, and it’s paying dividends immediately. That is the single most appealing thing about Neovim. I do the work, and the tool’s use makes it all the more immediately enjoyable.