Neovim is a gateway drug to becoming a hacker.

It teaches you to:

• load your own plugins and master your own config
• fix your own key-bindings
• solve your own problems as they arise and observe how others do things
• become familiar with an open-source community
• research and explore different ways of doing things
• become super comfortable working in the terminal
• become a better typist and hot-key aficionado
• gain a deeper understanding of how computers work

Without a doubt, it'll be a frustrating first couple weeks as you figure out how to set things up and train your muscle memory on vim motions, so ease into it by doing a little every day.

After a month, if you choose to go back to VSCode, Zed, Cursor, or any other IDE, you will have become a better developer by trying out nvim.

For me, I switch back-and-forth between nvim and different IDE's depending on how in flow I am with my task, and then slowly make time to shore up on missing skills or muscle memory later. But it's just super fun learning how to master your own config over time.

AND it's open-source and highly extensible. So you can customize things however you want as you go. This teaches you that you are not trapped by the design decisions of others, and it's up to you to hack things the way you want them to be.

No matter what your thoughts are on llm development taking over the world, giving yourself a few weeks to learn neovim is a good long-term investment on your programming journey.

There can be different ways of doing things.