The shortage and high price of RAM in 2026 have become a problem that is hard to ignore. I use an IDE for work every day. I also run some VMs on my laptop daily. At the same time my laptop has only 16 GiB of RAM. So the problem with RAM could have been a real issue for me. It could have, but it didn't. Why? Because my IDE uses only 30 MiB of RAM and 1–2% of CPU power!
Over the last 2 years I've been using NeoVim as my main text editor and IDE. First, I tried NeoVim on Arch Linux. My old NeoVim config is still available on my GitHub. When I switched to NixOS, I also moved from NeoVim to NixVim. NixVim is essentially NeoVim, but configured in the Nix language and distributed as a Nix flake. Everything I'll say about NixVim also applies to NeoVim. NixVim has tons of cool features that I could talk about for weeks but here are the ones that matter most to me:
RAM usage. As I said before, my NixVim uses 30 MiB of RAM. And yes, if I edit complicated Go code, LSP server and other running plugins use more memory. But even then we're talking about hundreds of megabytes.
Plugin ecosystem and customization. You can build exactly the configuration you need. You add only what you need — nothing extra. The entire configuration is in your hands. Literally.
Work via SSH and on servers. NixVim runs natively in a terminal, making it ideal for remote servers, containers, and headless environments. Traditional IDEs require GUI forwarding or special solutions like VS Code Remote Development.
Configuration reproducibility (NixOS special ability). The entire editor configuration is described declaratively in Nix. You can deploy an identical environment on any machine with one command, without manually installing plugins or tweaking settings.
Some might say that some IDEs have language-specific features (IntelliJ IDEA for Java, for example). That's true, but only for a handful of languages. In my entire career, I have never encountered a lack of functionality in NeoVim. What about you? Let's discuss in the comments!
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