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 was referring to without further explanation. He went on to explain that after the initial setup of the pair programming exercise the previous interviewer who 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?”.

In all honesty I found it more hilarious then prideful because I don’t think the ability to learn Neovim and Tmux is really indicative of the skill of a given Developer and I myself am far from being an expert user of such tools. I know some of the best Devs that work in a completely vanilla Vscode setups. I know some people that hail cursor as the new age of programming. But since watching others using Neovim and creating my own environment I’ve had a strong affinity towards it. There’s no single point of importance for using Neovim other than that it makes development feel like an addictive game that you get faster at when 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 immediately paying it’s dividends. That is the single most appealing thing about Neovim. I do the work and the use of the tool makes it all that more immediately enjoyable.