NeoVim Everything

Tags: utilities, vim

Since NeoVim's public release in 2015, I've been using it as my daily editor. Over time NeoVim replaced a few other tools in my toolbelt:

tmux

I used to be an avid user of tmux on my desktop, specifically for splitting Vim with other terminal applications. Most of the time, I used tmux to side-by-side Vim and a terminal session in urxvt. My typical work pattern being that I would have a single terminal window per-project I'm working on, with a tmux session running with any tools needed.

With NeoVim, 90% of the time when I start a new session I type: vsplit | term to get a new terminal session to go along with it (vertically split, with the terminal on the left). As a bonus, my terminal is now a buffer in Vim and it's now dead simple to copy and manipulate text output.

Conemu

On the Windows side, because of the lack of a decent terminal emulator I have found myself using neovim-qt as my editor/terminal emulator combo. The text rendering looks great and terminals in buffers are better than tabs any day.

Installation on Windows with Chocolatey couldn't be easier:

choco install neovim

tee

Per my answer for tmux, I now find myself almost completely ignoring tee. If I need to record or edit the output of a command line application, I simply switch to normal mode (CTRL-\ CTRL-n), select some text (SHIFT-v for visual lines) and copy the text into a register (y).

less

As with tee and tmux, paging through command line output is simple when it's in a buffer. Simply switch to normal mode (CTRL-\ CTRL-n) and walk (CTRL-b) or search (?) backwards through the terminal output.

More Vim!

Hopefully the next year will bring more Vim goodies!

By Colin Kennedy

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