toggleterm.nvim VS neovim

akinsho/toggleterm.nvim: A neovim lua plugin to help easily manage multiple terminal windows.

As a data point, I'd like to chime in here. I have been a 15 year user of tmux (and screen before that) and never thought I'd change my development habits. Over the holidays I decided I would do one of those once-every-five-years upgrades to my vim setup as I had accrued dozens of vendored plugins in normal vim and wanted to see what the big deal with neovim was.

I bit the bullet and evaluated some of the "distributions" (AstroNvim and kickstarter) and played around with all the new lua plugins that I had never thought I needed (why use telescope when FZF-vim worked so well?).

Anyways, after a month of tweaking and absorbing, I found myself running Neovide only, and doing something I never thought I'd see, running tmux from within neovim/neovide. I think this only works (for me) because of session management (there are half a dozen plugins for handling quickly changing 'workspaces') and because the built-in terminal (with a very useful plugin called toggleterm: https://github.com/akinsho/toggleterm.nvim) works so well.

I have not stopped using tmux and layouts, and it sits in another fullscreen iterm2 workspace, but I find that I now spend 90% of my time using a fullscreen neovide and summoning/toggling tmux momentarily for running commands.

Of course, the caveat here is that my preferred mode of operation is being fullscreen as often as possible. I think if your preferred mode of operation is to always see splits then running neovim from the terminal within tmux is still the way to go.

As for why I like neovide? I find the animations, when tweaked to be less 'cool' are extremely useful to see where the cursor jumps to. I am also a huge fan of the fact that I can finally use 'linespace' to put some space between my lines of code -- it is an aesthetic I didn't realize I wanted.

For splitting the terminal you could try either toggleterm or tmux. If you want to send things from one tmux pane to another, then you can use slime. For a toggle-able filetree, you can use nvim tree.

I just found toggleterm which feels awesome. Pretty much exactly what I was looking for to use with Alacritty but even better since its integrated into the rest of my Neovim workflow.

I saw this plugin that tells me how to do it, however I got confused after I added "require("toggleterm").setup({})" in the lazy.lua file and installed the package as well using the Lazy command

I tried toggleterm but I wasn't successful.

And I never really got into Gitsigns or vim-fugitive. Lots of people love them, so I'm sure they're great, but I'm happy opening a floating terminal with Toggleterm and using Lazygit.

I agree with u/Bamseg, but you can get what you want using toggleterm.nvim BUT NOT IN FLOAT.

I use gitsigns for linewise operations (blame, reset, etc), and a floating terminal (toggleterm) for everything else. flatten.nvim also helps with nested nvim instances.

but I ended up finding a good enough workaround by using Lazygit through Toggleterm.

Neovim

Vim is a highly efficient, keyboard-driven text editor that prioritizes speed, precision, and control. It’s been around for decades, but it’s far from outdated. In recent years, Vim has seen a resurgence, thanks largely to Neovim, a modern refactor of Vim that brings a faster core, better plugin support, and a vibrant, forward-looking community.

A text-based shell interface is extremely lightweight compared to modern IDEs. Because it runs in the terminal, even a feature-rich agent has very low overhead. According to Forgecode “Low Resource Usage: minimal impact on system performance”. In contrast, a full IDE can consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM or more, even when idle. In one user benchmark, Neovim (a terminal editor) used only about 10 MB of RAM, whereas Visual Studio Code (an Electron-based IDE) used roughly 700 MB with no files open. The savings add up quickly: even a hundred developers using shell agents could free up many gigabytes of memory compared to the same number running heavy IDE instances. In practice, a shell agent like Forge leaves almost all CPU and RAM free for your code compilation and tests. In a cloud or CI/CD pipeline, this efficiency translates directly into cost savings. You can run more parallel analyses or smaller instances when the tools are light. Over time, those saved resources mean lower infrastructure bills for large teams.

So I headed over to the Neovim GitHub like any lost soul would and followed the official install steps:

Neovim GitHub Repository

PDE (Personalized Development Environment): Neovim

I've used VSCode for years. It's great, no doubt. But when you have to juggle up to 5 projects daily, you'll find that it's going to block you away. Mine feels heavy, especially with multiple windows and extensions. This is why I decided to find an alternative, until I started using NeoVim instead.