2023 dotfiles retrospective

This year I wanted to have a reproducible developer setup that I could pull into different systems and be able to quickly work with a comfortable and familiar setup, regardless of the machine. The main focus award this year goes to... NVIM! (this was awarded with absolutely no statistics whatsoever)

Switching to Nvim from Vscode has not been entirely painless. In fact, I haven't fully dropped VsCode just yet, despite how much I want to. I find that VsCode is prone to using up a lot of memory on my system, being unresponsive, etc etc. There's lots of daily issues you'll experience after using vscode for a while, and there's definitely been some updates on vscode side to improve some of the things I have issues with. I think it's going to be hard to beat out a simple text editing application powered by your terminal. That's the main reason I went to Nvim. Performance. I have definitely lost a few key workflows I liked in VsCode, but it's not so debilitating that I need to immediately switch back to be at all productive. The thing I miss the most is the intuitive shortcuts VsCode has setup to quickly swap between two files, oh, and commenting (this one is honestly a big one and will probably be my first refactor target)

Here's a list of things that, currently, don't work great on my nvim setup:

• Commenting out blocks of code (I have a plugin for this, but the motions I set up don't seem to work)
• Using a debugger with typescript node.js projects (This still isn't entirely painless in vscode, but I find it a lot easier to spin up, currently)
• Text folding

One of my resolutions in regards to nvim this year is to redo the vim tutorial to see what new things I pick up. I've also been getting recommended lots of nice Nvim videos on youtube lately, which are giving me inspiration for things to do and ways to improve.