I use neovim by the way

As a developer/hacker, you need to be fast. Every millisecond you waste in your workflow adds up over time. 300ms startup time? Adds up to over a minute a year. Using your language server instead of a custom parser for syntax highlighting? Suuuuper sloooooow. Moving your hands away from your home-row to use a non-keyboard peripheral? Instant death (very time consuming). As the 11.4x developer that you are, these need to be the times saves that differentiate you from the pleb. From the other developers, nay; the code monkeys! You need to always stay one step ahead. And here's how.

Keyboard layout

First off, you need to learn an ergonomic keyboard layout. You can type with 10 fingers? Nice, but can you type 10 fingers where no key is what it says and your colleagues cannot help you anymore, as they don't know how to CRTL-C on your keyboard? I can! And it saves me approximately 0.002 seconds everytime I press an E. Because it's eRgONoMic. I mean, why would you need well-placed keybindings in your tools, if you don't use tools/default keybindings anyway? But I am getting ahead of myself. Point is, if you're not using Dvorak/Neo2/Bone/..., you can never be a proper graybeard.

Your Editor

The only real choice is between emacs and (neo)vim, since everything that came out after 1914 is not battle-tested enough. Emacs is actually quite the nice operating system, but it lacks a proper editor. Additionally — as you decided to use an eRgONoMic keyboard layout, that utilizes the CAPS-LOCK-Key — you cannot rebind the META-key to it, which makes emacs impossilble to use¹. Unfortunately, every other key is already occupied by your keyboard layout but for that you are able to type grεεκ-letters² without having to lookup the unicode characters. Lastly, emacs startup time is slower than you can blink. Unacceptable! This forces you to use vim, or — since you are an early adopter and cutting edge — neovim³. It has neo in the name, it is cool, it is hip, it is the obvious choice.

So what makes an IDE?

Kind of a stupid question. You don't really care what an IDE is. You just add plugins to your editor until you barely get the convenience of these bloated mainstream (and therefore unusable) tool selection behemoths like intelliJ. Want compiler warnings and errors? Install nvim-cmp and manually manage all your language servers with mason.

Want the text go all colorful? Use conform. But be careful. Some leaflover on the internet might suggest to use your language server for syntax highlighting. Typical .5 developer. Everyone knows that this is super slow. And we can't have slow for the sake of convenience! So install a parser generator instead with treesitter. That will even give you incremental selection and coding specific objects such as assignments or functions. Not that you would need this of course. Add some cosmetic touches with a terminal and a marvelous colorscheme. Beautif...

STOP!

Did this colleague just go by your desk without noticing you are using neovim? Your editor slowly starts looking like one of these mainstream IDEs! This is a red flag as your colleagues might not notice your superiority anymore!

Quick! Let's install a bigger status bar and uncommon file navigation that optimizes for screen focus areas. That's better!

Aftermath

You ramp up speed. Every time your coworkers have to move their hand for a CTRL-CLICK, you save .1 seconds with a gd and some window arrangement because nvim opened the definition in the wrong window. When your colleagues talk about their weekends, you insert yourself into the conversation by discussing the advantages of key-rolling compared to double-tapping and why CAPSLOCK-Q⁴ makes the best candidate for rebinding the ESC-key.

By now, the only voice you can hear clearly is god asking you for help converting a json into a toml in under 25 keystrokes. Unfortunately your treesitter integration broke with the latest update, so you put god off until another day.

And never forget: don't leave your coworkers too far behind. You still need them for flexing and showcasing. Afterall, this is the only way to satisfy your burning desire to show your superiority. Can it do X? Yes. Obviously it can. You just have to spend another evening waging different options, testing and debugging failing integrations and voila, you can run tests. Not without installing a proper adapter for every test framework out there, but that's a small price to pay for being able to flex.

When your Coworkers point out their IDE's ability to stage hunks in git instead of files, you point out that git add --patch is a thing. However since :!git add --patch requires an extra ! key press and may open an editor in your terminal session (to edit commit messages) in your nvim process in your terminal breaking the space-time continuum, you responsibly opt for a better vim integration.

With the arrival of claude-code, you were already using AI-integration for a while and able to add a persistent floating terminal for the claude-code-TUI to your config in 5 minutes.

You are unstoppable.

You are the true hacker.

All that's left to do is to reduce the startup time of your neovim config so that it's faster than intelliJ.

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