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neovim. I’ve been using vim or neovim for >25 years and it’s changed how my mind works to the point that other editors are awkward. I can also reliably find some form of vi on any machine I log onto and, while I am not necessarily writing Rust on a random machine at work, having to learn just one program for editing is nice.
+1 for Neovim I love that thing.
If anyone’s curious/interested in it… while the stock editor is pretty “basic” (it can still do a ton of stuff!), the plugin ecosystem (or whatever it’s called) is really nice. You can use “pre-built” ones like LunarVim, LazyVim, or NvChad (I’ve used this one, it aims to be highly customisable and it’s pretty nice). There are probably many others.
You might want to get used to the key binds and such before doing any of that though ahahah. Once you open it, if you type
:Tutorand press enter it should bring you to a little tutor program for explaining the basics.I do however highly encourage you to try making your own config! You could write it in vimscript, but Neovim has full support for Lua. You can even have multiple different init files for it. (You can select them with the
-uflag when runningnvim. Like:nvim -u path/to/my/config_file.lua). I liked ThePrimeagen’s video about making a config from scratch (personally I really like his energy and personality, but he does sometimes yell and stuff (i don’t think there’s much of this in this video) so it might not appeal to everyone). I haven’t really looked at any other resources (besides the built-in:help lua-guideand random searches), but I’m sure there’s a ton out there.It’s really fun :DD
I can’t really comment on the preconfigured packages; I learned way back in the 90s before things like that existed. Definitely recommend learning the editor before going crazy with customization, though, and the tutor is also where I started. There is an enormity of config options, as you’d expect for software that has almost 50 years of history, so just start with what you want / fixing what annoys you.
It’s nice to have everything ready for you in Lunar, Lazy, Chad Vim, but it is honestly too much for any newbie to take at once. For anyone starting with vim/neovim best advice is to start with vanilla experience: no configs, no plugins and just learn basics. Then search for fixes to major annoyances, and when you’re comfortable with keybindings look for plugins to extend features. You’ll quickly realize how small is number of customizations required to be fast and productive in [Neo]Vim.
I’m ignorant and putter around with WebStorm as an IDE, but I’d like to ditch it. Does neovim have similar functionality? I thought it was more of a text editor.
I have stayed as far as I can from web development for about 10 years so I can’t answer that question.
You’re wise. The entire JavaScript ecosystem is really great and hot garbage at the same time.
Helix text editor
I am not a hardcore programmer, but anytime I code anything, I use vscodium. It is VScode without the microsoft telemetry.
That sounds great! Does it support the plugins as well?
It has the same plugin system, but they pull from Open VSX rather than Microsoft’s extension marketplace. If there’s an extension not available there, you can still download it from Microsoft’s marketplace and then add it manually.
It’s also possible to swap out the extension registry entirely and still use Microsoft’s marketplace instead of Open VSX in VSCodium.
Once I started using CLion I couldn’t go back
Neovim. Its awesome with the rust plugin. Everything works and it’s fast.
Could you share your config?
I switched to the built-in LSP but keep hitting small issues with changes to mappings, etc. and keeping rust-analyzer updated is a pain.
So now I just use vscode, even though I’d really like to have neovim set up for small things.
VScode. It works mostly fine for me, using rust-analyzer and CodeLLDB
I love using helix. Not really an IDE, but since it has built-in support for language servers like rust-analyzer, it can do everything I need.
I’m just waiting for the inbuilt file explorer to stabilise. The only thing I miss is easy file navigation. The fuzzy searcher just isn’t what I want most of the time.
Wow, no one mentioning IntelliJ?? I use the free edition with Rust and it works great… the only thing missing is a debugger, which requires the CLion distribution which is not free… but so far that hasn’t been a big problem for me.
No one has said Emacs yet, I was a long time vim/neovim user but switched a couple of years ago, still learning rust but it’s been pretty comfy so far, plus I can wash my dishes in it.
Emacs is the best vim implementation.
Emacs is a great operating system but lacks a good text editor
I use Emacs for just about everythinhg, including Rust dev. It’s fantastic!
VsCode because I’m basic like that :^)
Helix is neat but not a full IDE. After a while I’m much more efficient and basically don’t use the mouse anymore. https://helix-editor.com/
vscode. I think anything that supports LSP works well with rust, but my vscode setup is comfy enough and devcontainers are rather nice.
Neovim with coc-rust-analyzer.
There’s also coc-rls.
I used VSCode for a few months and tried the CLion free trial after missing some of the features from IntelliJ I use at work. I think CLion edges out just a little, but not by much. Both have some rough patches.
Next time I pick up a Rust project I want to try neovim; I keep ending in tutorial hell for vim and never actually building anything with it. But before that, I think I want to ditch my Windows OS all together and pick some Linux distro, something I’ve been putting off a very long time.
Try Linux Mint. It’s made for people who are coming over from Windows. You’ll find it feels very familiar.
This was also the distribution I chose when first moving away from Windows and I can definitely recommend it. The vast majority of things worked out of the box, and people on the Linux Mint forum were very helpful in solving my remaining issues.