4 posts tagged with "neovim"

Introduction​

Every codebase eventually needs the same change in many places: a library swap, an API that changed shape, a convention the team agreed on last week. You know the usual options. Find and replace sees only text. Doing it by hand works for ten places and falls apart at three hundred. An AI assistant will happily make all three hundred edits, and then someone has to review each one.

In this blog, we will look at three tools that read code at three different levels. grep reads text. ast-grep reads structure, the syntax tree your editor already builds. A small local model, asked through classif, reads meaning. They are separate tools, each takes the part of the job it can see, and the interesting part is where each one stops.

Sooner or later you make the same small edit on line one, then line two, then line three. Neovim has had several ways to avoid that loop for years, and a newer one arrives with 0.13: built-in multicursor. This post walks through each method with a small example, covers multicursor in depth, and ends with a rule of thumb and a keystroke count for nine exercises. Multicursor is available only in nightly builds until Neovim 0.13 ships; every other method works in any Neovim, and in Vim.

The post goes with the video Neovim Multi-Line Editing Overview, Multicursor Included, which plays three of the exercises live.

Neovim 0.12 landed with a pile of things that used to be plugins: a native plugin manager (vim.pack), a native :restart, stock LSP keymaps, treesitter incremental selection. The release notes read like a checklist of things to rip out of your config.

So I went through mine, one area at a time, asking each the same question: should this move to the 0.12 way of doing it?

Four of the seven came back with some flavor of "no," and that turned out to be the useful part. Three earned a yes and I made the changes. The rest I left alone on purpose. The features are real and they work, but whether your config should adopt them is a different question, and the honest answer was mostly to leave it alone.

You install a plugin for multi-cursor editing. Another for shell integration. A third for incremental search preview. Your plugin count grows, startup time increases, and you debug compatibility issues between packages.

Most of these features exist in vanilla Neovim. Have existed since Vim 7. Here are 10 built-in features that replace common plugins.