It really doesn’t. The time you spend learning it and setting your config will never pay off and even after you do these things the time it saves you is negligible. I can use Zed and have 90% what Neovim offers me, it even has really good vim motions. Picking them up for productivity is a bad reason to do it.

I really liked a talk by TJ titled (Neo)Vim Made Me a Better Software Developer. The reason he uses it - is because it was basically a playground where he could play around with his code and get instant feedback as he’s the “customer”.

I can relate to this. Neovim is really extensible and minimal by default. This encourages 2 things:

1. To live close to your code. You really get an understanding of all of the underlying tools related to your development environment and it gives you control to make it as minimal as you want it. There’s wayy less abstractions on top to simplify stuff for you. When I was a beginner using Webstorm or whatever I had no clue what a LSP was. Git? Just use built in GUI why bother learning commands? Terminal? Why would I need that? Ripgrep? Treesitter?
2. To play around, customize, build stuff. There’s lots of API’s and you can change a lot in the editor. I made Neovim my main markdown editor with a few tweaks in my config. It’s minimal and I like it. Wayyy better than Obsidian.

And at the end of the day it’s kinda fun. It makes writing code more more enjoyable as you always end up learning how to navigate your code base more efficiently. Like a game almost :)