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by magguzu 80 days ago
I use neovim daily but am 100% sure I'm not even scratching the surface of its power. In fact I'm not even sure I'm using anything specific to the "neo" variant vs plain vim.

I can do simple search/replace, page up/down, jump to character or delete x words, but I feel like I'm missing a lot to really take advantage of it.

Is there a tutorial or guide people recommend to become more of a power user? The only plugin I have is the Markdown editor for instance.

5 comments

I'd recommend checking out lazyvim, it comes with a bunch of very sensible plugins and you can read through the lazyvim docs (and then click through to individual plugin docs) to discover them and see which ones you want to use.
I recently switched to LazyVim and the default config in their tutorial included all the “extras”. It transformed vim into some kind of hallucinogenic kaleidoscope of an IDE with all sorts of telescoping overlays and pop-ups with a color scheme that fits well with an 8 year old girl’s princess themed birthday party. I actually screamed a little.

Not sensible. completely insane.

Not sure about the "tutorial", but I use lazyvim as base for LSPs, snacks, neo-tree and a theme matching the rest of my desktop and it seems to be fine?

nvim has a lot of "fun" plugins that you wouldn't actually use so I think you might have ran into that.

there’s the LazyVim distro and the lazy.nvim plugin on which it was built. the latter is a bit more sensible.
Just to add, there are so many hour long Neovim setup videos on youtube that will make your life easier
Honestly, same. I did naturally start to pick up things such as c(code actions) and some git related helpers. But <cnt><c/d/n/o/y/p> gets you 90% of the way there with / navigation.

Also just use the mouse! Lazyvim has great support for it.

<leader>SK is your friend as well.

Remember that `<leader>SK` does not show neovim built ins. Example ctrl-o which moves to older jumplist position is not show in it.

I'd also suggest kickstart.nvim over Lazyvim as its leaner with a primary file for configuration it is not lacking power.

Unfortunately kickstart.nvim is no longer actively maintained.
The repository still get updates, don't see any words to that end on front page. There is a new issue about discussion on what changes for Neovim 0.12 to consider...

Whats your source?

You _can_ just use a mouse, but I would not recommend it for someone who wants to learn to become a power user.

I feel like the habit I’ve benefited the most from on my neovim journey has been reaching for :h before doing any web search. Good completion in the command-line helps a lot there.

> Also just use the mouse! Lazyvim has great support for it.

My mileage was quite different: last time I tried, scrolling too fast with the mouse wheel consistently caused a segfault.

Drew Neil‘s books, Practical Vim and Modern Vim are excellent.
If you search up vim games you'll find some fun tutorials.