Ok, this sounds awesome, but do you miss the GUI integrations? like , being able to pop a document open in your editor from the desktop?
It just feels like it's hard to nail down your preferred workflow / setup ... but it's likely worth it if you're using it daily!
Are there any good visual or video demos of using this type of setup? I'm having trouble picturing what makes people really love this type of TUI-only workflow.
As an aside, it would be straightforward to make vim/neovim the editor that opens when you double click a text file on the desktop.
This kind of setup is at its most powerful when you live on the command line though. For instance, you need to modify .py files across multiple projects that mention a certain variable, have a certain word in their name, and were modified within the last month.
That search is a bit easier in bash/zsh than it is in most IDEs and the strength of vim/neovim is the shell integration.
You're holding it wrong if you're dragging files around a desktop to open them.
Just use a fuzzy file finder within the terminal or within vim itself.
lazyvim DOES have mouse and GUI-type support. This is a huge myth! I use mouse regulary in neovim and tmux.
I use Emacs and opening a new file is just pressing “C-x C-f” (find-file), typing the path (completion is available), and pressing enter. As for vim, I would spawn a new terminal (WM keybind, new tab, new pane with tmux), cd to the directory and open it with vim.
The nice thing is that I rely only on the keyboard, no need to point with the mouse. It may not be faster, but typing is sequential and there’s no context switching. So muscle memory helps a lot. Just like you don’t think about each character when you write, I don’t really think about the shortcuts and commands I use.
It's not my kind of workflow but you can download a graphical client like Neovide, which I think has options for opening directly from your file browser.
I typically have a terminal-heavy workflow so it's very rare that I'm browsing to files from within my desktop, but if I am using Dolphin to look for a file I have a "Open terminal here" shortcut and then I'll usually just run "nvim doc.md".
Why not give it a try? You'll likely find that there's an adjustment period and you can always switch back to your old editor if you don't like it. The beauty of it is that you can build it into whatever IDE you want instead of having useless features shoved into your IDE whether you use them or not.