devFC

My guide to learn Vim/Neovim in 2025 

- Don't pressure yourself to learn in prod. Feel free to stick with your primary editor when you start learning. You'll just get frustrated with your speed since you're just starting out, so don't sacrifice your productivity. Make learning vim a fun side project to start! 

- Start with just vim motions. These motions/keybindings exist outside of just vim and live in multiple applications, and imo should be learned whether or not you decide to use vim as a text editor. Start learning through some videos like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZO9A5F6BZs&t=103s

- Use a basic Neovim setup to start. Neovim is a community run fork of the original Vim program written in Lua, allowing people to build insane plugins and themes into the editor. It makes it infinitely customizable, similar to linux. This can get overwhelming, and truthfully you won't know what to customize when you first start. With that said I would recommend using a good defaults setup like https://www.lazyvim.org/. Then when you're ready to build your own config (which I would recommend), follow this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHTeCSVAFNY&list=PLsz00TDipIffreIaUNk64KxTIkQaGguqn 

- A few other resources I would recommend as great ways to practice: 

If you have vim installed, just run `vimtutor` in the terminal and learn the old fashion way! 

If you're a regular React/Next.js dev, I would highly recommend this walkthrough: https://vimforreactdevs.com/

This is by all means not a comprehensive list but I think it covers the basics. The real power of vim/neovim is learning to edit text efficiently, so if you get anything from this post, LEARN VIM BINDINGS. You will not regret it!! For context I don't use Neovim every day but I do use the Vim bindings in Zed. I would also argue learning to configure Neovim will teach you a lot about system configs. 

And of course, if you get stuck or have questions, please do send me a DC as I would love to assist you on your journey :)

I use vim btw!

:Tutor is the cheatcode!

greatest tip is:

"If you have vim installed, just run `vimtutor` in the terminal and learn the old fashion way!" @stevedylandev.eth 

re debugging on macos get Ghostty as terminal (way faster then Terminal, opensource, no subscription) as Terminal doesn't support rich colours so any neovim config will look as because of the themes.

DX Engineer | DevRel at OpenZeppelin | Building orbiter.host & bhvr.dev | opinions are my own

Farcaster Development Boutique @ https://dTech.vision 💜 in love with tech 🤓decentralization, fitness and oldschool rap 😎