Writing the code itself is very similar to using an IDE: with very little config effort, you have stuff like autocomplete, syntax highlighting, LSP errors, function signature hints, ‘jump to definition’, git integration, etc. Moving around is just a matter of building up the muscle memory. Finding things across the codebase is also easy with tools like fzf and Ag.

Like IDE users often do, executing and building the code can be done through the command line.

More complex operations like refactoring are where IDEs have neovim beaten by a mile. Although I haven’t spent time researching it, I don’t know if it’s possible to have that kind of advanced functionality within neovim.

With recent AI tools (a lot of which, at the end of the day, are CLI tools), the delta between neovim and a full IDE has shrunk further because (for better or worse, probably for worse) people are doing less of the actual coding.

I know more than one person (I think 4, including me) who code for a living and essentially live in tmux.

Good idea. I’ll probably give it a few hours to see if anyone else here has any ideas on how to make sure it’s not on my end, then I’ll open an issue.