Around a year ago, I decided to use Neovim as my editor for working on Unity-based projects. After some involved setup, I thought I had everything just how I liked it. Then my autocomplete broke one too many times, and I knew it just wasn’t worth the hassle. It was time to bite the bullet and use VSCode; but could I do that without giving up Vim?
Most text editors targeted towards programmer types have some kind of vim mode. Despite being an avid vim user, I never enable it. The emulation is never exact enough; invariably I’ll try something like a basic macro and completely fumble as I hit a missing feature or three. At that point I’d rather just use the basic EMacs shortcuts available in all macOS input fields. Previously I had tried a Vim plugin for VSCode and had the same disappointing experience. Neovim changed the game in Vim modes, though. The re-architecture of the project apparently allows Neovim to be fully embedded within other applications. Instead of relying on janky emulations, I can get the real thing.
I installed the VSCode plugin and had to do some fiddling to get it recognize my nvim binary (which I’ve unfortunately now forgotten). Then I had to make a few VSCode-specific tweaks to my config. I skipped loading basically all my usual plugins. LSP, syntax highlighting, git change markers: all these sorts of things are built into VSCode (and won’t work with the Neovim ⭤ VSCode bridge anyways). I also had to re-do all my custom keybindings (for example, opening a fuzzy finder when I hit t in normal mode) to bind to VSCode actions instead. vscode-neovim is a handy plugin that allows me to do that very easily.
For the past few months I’ve been using this setup as a daily driver. The C# autocomplete integration works out of the box, unlike in my previous Neovim setup (because it’s a proprietary Microsoft extension >_>). Go-to-definition and find-references and all that are working fine. All around it’s a much better C# editing experience. For the other projects in our monorepo (some Terraform and Typescript, mostly), things work fine. I would prefer to be back in my natural habitat (nvim + tmux + fish) but it’s more convenient to have the whole monorepo open in VSCode than to jump back and forth between environments.
So on one hand, I did sorta give up on having my neovim + Unity setup from my last post. But on the other, I maybe have the best of both worlds?