Neovim in 2026: A Practical Setup for People Who Also Have Work to Do

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Neovim has a reputation, and it isn’t entirely undeserved: the editor you spend a weekend configuring instead of using. I’ve lost those weekends. I’ve stayed up until 2am chasing a plugin conflict that turned out to be a load-order problem, and I’ve rebuilt my config from scratch more times than I’ll admit in writing. I’ve also come out the other side with an editor I genuinely prefer to anything else — and the good news, the whole reason for this post, is that in 2026 you no longer have to pay that tax. The ecosystem has matured into a small set of plugins that do the heavy lifting, and a sensible config is now a few hundred lines of readable Lua rather than a haunted 3,000-line init.vim inherited from a stranger’s dotfiles. This is the setup I’d hand someone who wants a capable editor and also, crucially, has actual work to do this week.

Nix: Reproducible Development Environments (Once You Survive the Learning Curve)

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Every developer has lived the same small tragedy. A new colleague clones the repo, follows the README to the letter, and nothing works. The wrong version of Node. A missing system library. A make step that needs a tool nobody documented because it’s been on the lead’s laptop since 2019 and they forgot it wasn’t standard. Half a day vanishes into “what version of what do you have installed”, and the answer, always, is different from mine. Nix exists to make this entire category of misery go away — and it does, eventually, after putting you through a learning curve I will not pretend is gentle. This post is both the pitch and the warning, because I think the pitch is real and the warning is earned.

Devtools - Tag - vo.rs

Neovim in 2026: A Practical Setup for People Who Also Have Work to Do

Nix: Reproducible Development Environments (Once You Survive the Learning Curve)