I've used VS Code since 2020. It was fast enough, extensible enough, and everyone on the team used it, which made pairing easy. But three months ago, during a long refactoring session, I noticed I was spending more time fighting the editor than writing code. Extensions were conflicting, startup was sluggish, and I had this nagging feeling that my hands were doing unnecessary work.
So I switched to Neovim. Here's the honest take.
The first two weeks were painful
Let's not romanticize this. The first two weeks were a net productivity loss. Muscle memory fought me on every keystroke. I kept reaching for Cmd+P and getting nothing. My config was a mess of copied snippets from Reddit that half-worked.
The turning point was when I stopped trying to make Neovim "feel like VS Code" and started learning it on its own terms. Motions, text objects, macros — these aren't VS Code shortcuts with different keybindings. They're a fundamentally different way of editing text.
What's better
Speed. Not just startup speed (though opening in 50ms is nice), but editing speed. Once the motions are in your fingers, you can express complex edits — "delete inside this function's arguments" or "change every occurrence of this variable in the current scope" — with a few keystrokes instead of mouse gymnastics.
The terminal integration is seamless. My editor, my git client, my file manager, and my test runner all live in the same tmux session. Context switching went from "click between applications" to "hit a keybinding."
What's worse
Setup cost is real. I spent probably 15 hours on my config before it felt usable. LSP configuration is more manual than VS Code's "install extension, done" model. And debugging — I still sometimes drop back to VS Code for complex debugging sessions with breakpoints.
The ecosystem is also more fragmented. Telescope or fzf-lua? lazy.nvim or packer? native LSP or CoC? Every choice has tradeoffs, and the community is opinionated in that way open source communities often are.
Three months in
I'm faster. Not dramatically — maybe 15-20% on average — but the gains compound on longer editing sessions. And there's a qualitative difference in how it feels. Editing text in Neovim feels like speaking a language. VS Code felt like filling out forms.
Would I recommend the switch? Only if you're genuinely curious and willing to invest the upfront time. It's not objectively better. It's differently good, in ways that matter more for some workflows than others.