April 20, 2026
Most developers reach for VS Code by default. It’s a reasonable choice — good ecosystem, low friction, gets out of your way. I used it for years. At some point I started paying attention to how much time I spent with my hands off the keyboard, reaching for the mouse to navigate, click through file trees, manage tabs. It adds up.
I’ve been running WezTerm and Neovim as my primary development environment for a while now. I work across Go, TypeScript, and Angular — a reasonably demanding setup that requires solid LSP support, fast navigation, and a terminal that doesn’t slow me down. Here’s what I’ve learned.
Why WezTerm over everything else
The terminal landscape is crowded. iTerm2, Alacritty, Kitty, Ghostty — all solid. I landed on WezTerm for a few specific reasons.
It’s configured in Lua. That sounds minor but it matters: the config file is a real programming language, not an INI file with magic strings. You can write functions, conditionals, and abstractions. Here’s a minimal starting point:
local wezterm = require 'wezterm'
local config = wezterm.config_builder()
config.font = wezterm.font('FiraCode Nerd Font', { weight = 'Regular' })
config.font_size = 14.0
config.color_scheme = 'Tokyo Night'
config.enable_tab_bar = true
config.hide_tab_bar_if_only_one_tab = true
config.window_padding = { left = 8, right = 8, top = 8, bottom = 8 }
return config
WezTerm also has a built-in multiplexer, and I use it heavily. Tab management is handled entirely through keyboard shortcuts — opening, closing, and switching tabs without touching the mouse. Each tab is a context: a project, a running process, a scratch environment. When I’m inside Neovim, I hand off navigation entirely to its internal buffer management and fuzzy search tooling. The two layers stay clean and don’t fight each other.
GPU rendering means it stays fast even with large outputs. And it works identically on macOS and Linux, which matters when you’re working across machines.
Why Neovim over VS Code
This is the more loaded question, and I want to be honest about it: Neovim is not better than VS Code in every way. The plugin ecosystem is more fragmented, setup takes real time, and new contributors to a project can’t just open your config and understand it immediately.
What Neovim does better: speed, keyboard-centricity, and composability. Once you internalize modal editing — the idea that you’re either navigating or editing, not both simultaneously — the efficiency difference is real. Motions like ciw (change inner word), va{ (select around braces), or % (jump to matching bracket) stop being things you remember and start being things you reach for without thinking.
The LSP support in modern Neovim is excellent. With mason.nvim handling server installation and nvim-lspconfig wiring them up, you get the same language intelligence VS Code has — autocompletion, go-to-definition, inline diagnostics, rename across files — without a separate application running.
The plugin stack that actually matters
There are a thousand Neovim plugin lists. Most include too much. Here’s what I actually use daily:
lazy.nvim — plugin manager. Lazy-loads plugins so startup stays fast.
telescope.nvim — fuzzy finder for files, grep, LSP symbols, git history. This is the single highest-leverage plugin in the ecosystem. ff to find a file and fg to grep across the project replace most file tree navigation.
nvim-treesitter — syntax highlighting and code understanding via AST parsing rather than regex. Makes highlighting accurate and enables smart text objects.
nvim-cmp — completion engine. Pulls from LSP, snippets, buffer words. Feels like IDE completion once configured.
gitsigns.nvim — inline git blame, hunk staging, diff previews in the gutter. The kind of thing you don't know you need until you have it.
conform.nvim — formatting on save, language-aware. Runs gofmt on Go files, prettier on TypeScript, without you thinking about it.
A minimal plugin setup with these six gets you 90% of the way to a full IDE experience.
How WezTerm and Neovim work together
The short version: WezTerm is the container, Neovim is the environment. WezTerm handles font rendering, color, and tab management. Neovim handles editing, navigation, and LSP.
I use WezTerm’s tab system for context switching — one tab per project or major task — and Neovim’s buffer and split system for everything within a project. The combination keeps me in the keyboard almost entirely. A typical navigation sequence: ff to jump to a file, gd to go to a definition, to jump back, fg to grep for a usage. No mouse involved.
Terminal commands stay in a dedicated WezTerm tab rather than Neovim’s built-in terminal, which keeps the separation clean.
The learning curve is real, and that’s fine
I’m not going to undersell this. Getting productive in Neovim takes weeks, not hours. Vim motions have to become muscle memory, and that only happens through deliberate repetition — not reading about them.
The path that worked for me: I started with VS Code in Vim mode. Not Neovim, not a terminal editor — just the Vim keybindings extension in an environment I already knew. That removed the “where is everything” friction and let me focus entirely on building motion muscle memory. I also spent time with Vim Adventures, a browser game that teaches Vim navigation through actual gameplay. It sounds gimmicky. It works.
By the time I moved to Neovim full-time, the motions were already there. The transition became about configuration and workflow, not simultaneously learning a new editor and a new input model.
The other thing that helped: don’t try to replicate your VS Code setup in Neovim. Start with less than you think you need. Add things when you feel a specific friction, not because a blog post said you should. The instinct to add plugins until it feels familiar is how you end up with a config you don’t understand.
Is it worth it?
For me, yes — clearly. The speed, the composability, the satisfaction of a workflow that fits exactly how I think. But the honest answer is: it depends on what you optimize for. If you want to minimize setup time and maximize immediate productivity, VS Code wins. If you want an environment you can tune to exactly how your brain works and that will feel faster every month you use it, Neovim is worth the investment.
At M²S² Engineering Group, the tools are always in service of the work — not the other way around. If you’re thinking through your team’s developer experience or how tooling choices affect velocity, let’s talk.
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