unix-as-ide VS kickstart.nvim

> I've never understood why people and to extend vim to try to make it half of an IDE.

Because vim ships with on any *nix machine and provides a consistent experience no matter where you use it.

Vim is the DE part and people add plugins or whatever to enrich the text editing experience with LSPs or other language aware plugins, and the I in IDE is in the form of the integration with the tooling already available.

This[0] might shed some better light on the "why"

[0] https://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/series/unix-as-ide/

Check out “UNIX as an IDE”. First Google hit; https://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/series/unix-as-ide/ There are some great talks on YouTube but can’t be bothered to search :)

I use the CLI as my IDE. For me, that's FreeBSD or OpenBSD most of the time with a little bit of Linux (and as little Windows as possible). I usually wrap it all in a tmux session, but with vim/neovim offering :terminal functionality these days, I could see an alternate universe where that got flipped/inverted.

See Unix as IDE for an example.

I choose vim/neovim because I need a "just" code editor, and also it can be easily leverage my tools capabilities on UNIX way, and you can read more on this article Unix as an IDE, but the all-in-solutions, like an IDE, is not the right tool for code editing, it came with a lot of features and defaults that you in most cases I don't need it, or I have to learn how to use them according to that IDE.

Your teacher probably subscribes to the idea of Unix as an IDE, and I do too! It's important IMO to avoid holy wars, but there are some spectacular tools built into your Unix computer if you take the time to get to know them.

Vim is first and foremost a text-editor. In the Unix philosophy other tools should fill the places of the functionality a fully-fledged IDE gives you. You can add plugins and heavily craft your .vimrc to make it a lot like an IDE. But that's not really the "unix way" so to speak. I'm not necessarily some sort of coding elitist. I'll settle for other tools when I have to. I've also spent more hours than I care to admit making VIM more or less an IDE. But there is a sort of simplicity in being able to develop remotely in a test environment using vim and few other CLI tools. I recommend checking out Unix as and IDE for an intro to what I'm talking about.

Yes, this helped me https://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/series/unix-as-ide/

Out of the box it offers almost nothing, but after 7 years of development I like that. I love the idea of customizing to my needs my IDE, so with the help of kickstart.nvim I have with 1 minute of installing and 10 extra minutes of configuration a complete IDE.

I recently started coding with Neovim using kickstart.nvim as the template for my editor configuration. I downloaded the python-lsp-server package using Mason, but I was disappointed to discover that the IntelliSense on my third party dependencies didn't work. The LSP was resolving to my global Python installation, which did not have the packages from my virtual environment (venv) installed.

First thing I did was get kickstart.nvim. I had heard it was extremely useful (and it was). It was very easy to install. I start reading through init.lua, and it told me to run :Tutor, which is almost 1,000 lines of learning how to use Neovim, to which I obviously ran that command and started reading. Obviously, it takes a bit of time to complete :Tutor, but it's well worth it. "hjkl" wasn't too hard to get used to, also repeating motions by using numbers was useful, such as using '5dd' to delete 5 lines. I highly suggest reading this file, especially since I didn't really know about the different modes, which is probably why I failed to switch the other times. You would start writing your code, then Neovim would say that it can't find that command, you would accidently type an i and then start typing, and so on, it was a nightmare. For those that don't know the modes, here is each mode and how to get between them.

I also suggest against using distributions. Instead of learning how to configure nvim itself you're learning to configure that specific distro.

I suggest to take someone's lua config and start from there. Kickstart.nvim is a good one: https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim

1) the option I wouldn’t chose, use Kickstarter. It’s a minimal starter config, using a single init.lua that helps you build a config slowly. https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim

I highly recommend Lazyvim for if you want to have a VSCode (ish) like experience that still exposes you to configuring in Lua. Or Kickstart.nvim if you want a more "from scratch" experience

In case it is helpful, I am using kickstart.nvim with only minor modifications.

One of the project goals is to become something like kickstart.nvim. Or, to be a reference if someone doesn't know how to do something.