neovim + TypeScript = ⚡️

March 15, 2023

This is a rave about neovim. I've been using (neo)vim for nearly a decade now. Investing my time into learning how to operate it was the best decision I've made, as far as tech skills goes.

Why? #

  • It enables me to take full advantage of my "flow moments" by helping me work faster
  • It's distraction-free. There are no shiny buttons or panels like in IDEs, and nothing that takes my focus away
  • It runs in the Terminal, my native environment for everything. I don't have to choose between my editor or Terminal or jankily embed a Terminal into my editor
  • It lightens the load on my wrists since I never have to use the mouse when editing or writing (which is a huge life-saver when working on laptops)
  • It's lightweight - the CPU/memory footprint is 5-10x lesser than an IDE or other editors (except Sublime Text) on average

Here's what I can do: #

...without touching the mouse at all :-)

Auto-complete #

CTRL + N lets me to cycle through completions, with a small window displaying type information and docstrings.

Navigate quickly #

I can open up a project tree with <leader>; (powered by NERDTree), and do a filename fuzzy-search using <leader>t (powered by fzf.vim).

Fuzzy-search all files in directory #

<leader>s brings up a ripgrep window for fuzzy-searching text across the entire directory.

Browse to type signatures #

SHIFT + K gives me a popup with the type signature and docstring. It's a general function for displaying information about the current symbol. It can use the LSP or even man pages, so I can SHIFT + K almost anything to bring up its documentation when available.

Browsing to the full type definition (.d.ts) is triggered by gd keybind, which calls the jumpDefinition function of coc.nvim.

Autofix #

<leader>i sorts and organize imports. It calls the LSP's (tsserver in this case) organizeImport function via coc.nvim.

<leader>f formats the file using the same method via a configured formatter on the LSP (I'm using Prettier).

My set-up #

You can find all of my neovim config here.

Like what you see? #

Give (neo)vim a whirl! Once you get past the learning curve and start building muscle memory, you'll wonder why you didn't start using it earlier.

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