this is some more recent reflections on using neovim as a code editor.

# what I absolutely can’t live without (so far)

neo-tree
neo-tree offers three things that makes my life much easier: 1) most obviously the filesystem tree, 2) a git status tree that shows modified, new and deleted files in the current git workspace and 3) a buffer list that shows currently opened files.

GitSigns
I use neo-tree’s git status view more often than the gitsigns; but when I need to do code review and prepare git commits, GitSigns is my best friend: I can interactively go through all the changes and stage them by hunks. IMO git add and git add -i is way too primitive.

live grep
the reason I’m using less LSPs is live grep : this is very powerful, and it’s much much much more performant that LSPs when you want to find something. Well there are {limits} but in general grep does the job very well. One extreme example is: when browsing linux kernel source tree, lsp simply won’t work!

The plugin I’m using here is telescope: I know telescope is much more than giving me a fuzzy finder: it handles lsps, buffer managements, helper searcher, and many others. The only two features I use from telescope though, is live grep and file finder.

comment and formatting
it’s a pain to manually toggle code comment; it’s a pain to manually format code, period.

# why no auto-completion?

it’s hard to explain: okay let’s put it this way, I still love auto-completion when I’m writing a language that I’m not comfortable with and requires a lot of brain memory (I’m talking about latex). But for programming

# why I can live without language servers?

my list of plugins:

life quality plugins:

• Comment.nvim : toggle code comment
• dagon : my “monochrome” colorscheme
• formatter.nvim : code formatting (wrapper for external tools)
• gitsigns.nvim : git integration
• lazy.nvim : plugin management
• neo-tree.nvim : tree UI for filesystem, buffers, and git status
• nvim-autopairs : inserting a pair
• telescope.nvim : UI for fuzzy finder and live grep

less essential plugins

• tabular : auto tab indents
• tagbar : UI for ctags
• vim-better-whitespace : highlight trailing spaces

implicits (deps):

• nui.nvim : required by neo-tree
• plenary.nvim : required by neo-tree

looks necessary but actually no:

• nvim-cmp : autocompletion
• lspconfig : the LSPs…
• markdown* : editing and preview related plugins