It's been over a year since I abandoned VS Code and switched to Neovim as my primary text editor for programming and development.
It has been such a productive experience. Most of the time, if you have a good Neovim config (which, by the way, takes its own share of time to set up), you almost never use the mouse at all. hjkl have become my go-tos — I try to use them for everything possible. For example, if I want to switch tiles in Hyprland (which, by the way, is a cool tiling window manager), I use hjkl for that too.
Even if you’re a beginner, learning Vim motions by installing a native extension or plugin for your IDE will make you much more effective with the keyboard. I’m a strong believer in using the keyboard as much as possible because it’s the only thing that will truly make you faster and more efficient at typing or coding, since you’re less distracted by the mouse.
Even if you don’t want to use Neovim because you find it time-consuming to configure, I’d still suggest starting with IdeaVim in IntelliJ or the Vim extension in VS Code — both provide similar functionality. I started with IntelliJ, then switched to Neovim. But it’s perfectly fine if you stick to modern IDEs; just make sure you learn whatever tool you’re using and use it to its fullest potential so you can get the most out of it.
Remember productive developer is not the one who has 200wpm typing speed, productive developer is the one who knows how to use his/her tools at fullest of it's capacity.
And if you want to start with neovim I would suggest starting with starter kit(https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim). It has all basics covered with good inline documentation.
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