Change your editor

After hearing a lot of people talk about how they love their vscode setup and how they love the fact that vscode is open source (it isn’t open source btw), I decided to make a small post walking people through what VSCode is and what alternatives they should use (atleast try).

What is VSCode

VSCode is Microsoft’s version of Code - OSS. So they take this version of code, slap a bunch of their logo’s on there, integrate it with the the VScode marketplace and most importantly add telemetry. I won’t go into why this is bad, since it is all closed source we will never know for sure.

So if possible avoid using VSCode, unless you really need to use their Live Share feature which as far as my knowledge goes, is not supported on neither VSCodium or Code OSS.

Alternative: VSCodium/Code OSS

VSCodium provides the binary from building Microsoft’s vscode repository while removing the telemetry and other deeply nested links. This is under the MIT license. You can check out their website and github repo.

Code OSS is the open source project(GitHub) that Microsoft Visual Studio builds upon, i.e. with no propreitary code.

Neovim

An open source project that is an extension of Vim that can be customized using lua. It is free and open source, as well as being community led.

I will briefly go over how to get neovim setup. There are also quiet a few videos out there on youtube and odysee that show how to make neovim your IDE in around 10 minutes.

You see more information on their website and their GitHub repo

Throughout the following “guide” which walks you through how to make a simple neovim config like mine, you can visit the GitHub repository for it.

Update: In the quickstart guide below, I am using packer.nvim, but the recent trend has been to use lazy.nvim

Getting Started

Your neovim configuration rests in the ~/.config/nvim directory. Lets create a file called init.lua here.

To make a “Clean configuration”, we will be structuring the the directory as follows

.
├── after
│   └── plugin
├── lua
│   └── core
├── init.lua <---------- Referred to as top init.lua

Now let’s make these directories

• ./after/plugin:

This will contain all the plugin specific lua files. For example I might have a ./after/plugin/prettier.lua file with my prettier plugin settings. All files in this directory will be loaded at runtime.

It will be empty for now but you will populate it as you install plugins.

• ./lua/core

In this lua module we will have our core settings, such as initializing packer (our plugin manager of choice) and making sure our plugins are installed. We will also set our keymaps and other vim settings here.

Core settings

Let’s make a file ./lua/core/base.lua to have all of our neovim settings. These will include things life font family, font size etc. Here is an example enabling relative line numbers.

./lua/core/base.lua

vim.opt.relativenumber = true

This is optional, but if you have remaps (remapping actions to custom keybinds) then let’s make ./lua/core/remaps.lua file and put all of that in here.

./lua/core/remaps.lua

vim.g.mapleader = " "
vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>pv", vim.cmd.Ex)
vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>bs", vim.cmd.write)

To make all our files here accessible with just one import, let’s create a file ./lua/ core/init.lua.

./lua/core/init.lua

require("core.base")
require("core.remap")

Getting plugins installed

We are gonna be using packer.nvim which is really easy to get started with. We will be using the code snippet under Bootstrapping so that packer gets installed automatically on new computers using this config. Let’s make a ./lua/core/packer.lua file and paste in the code snippet from their GitHub. We will need to add this as an import to ./lua/core/init.lua.

./lua/core/init.lua

...
require("core.packer")

Now let’s close and open nvim, to see packer being installed!

Lets get back into ./lua/core/packer.lua and add the plugins we want. For example some of the plugins you might want could be lsp-zero to get an easy and quick lsp setup in neovim. You can read more about it on its GitHub page

./lua/core/packer.lua

...
use {
        'VonHeikemen/lsp-zero.nvim',
        requires = {
            -- LSP Support
            { 'neovim/nvim-lspconfig' },
            { 'williamboman/mason.nvim' },
            { 'williamboman/mason-lspconfig.nvim' },

            -- Autocompletion
            { 'hrsh7th/nvim-cmp' },
            { 'hrsh7th/cmp-buffer' },
            { 'hrsh7th/cmp-path' },
            { 'saadparwaiz1/cmp_luasnip' },
            { 'hrsh7th/cmp-nvim-lsp' },
            { 'hrsh7th/cmp-nvim-lua' },

            -- Snippets
            { 'L3MON4D3/LuaSnip' },
            { 'rafamadriz/friendly-snippets' },
        }
    }
...

Remember to run :PackerSync and :PackerInstall after adding new plugins.

Configuring lsp-zero

We can now start configuring packer.nvim that we installed by creating the file ./after/plugin/lsp.lua

./after/plugin/lsp.lua

local lsp = require('lsp-zero')
lsp.preset('recommended')

lsp.ensure_installed({
  'tsserver',
  'eslint',
  'rust_analyzer',
  'gopls',
  'pyright',
})
lsp.setup()

Emacs

If you really wanted to, you can do everything from this amazing text editor. It is well out of this post’s scope to set-up emacs as emacs configurations are usually quite opinionated. I personally have been using a customized doom emacs config, but soon hoping to move onto my own emacs config with emacs 29 when I get the free time.

The reason I said free time above is because I am very comfy and at home with my config right now, it is not because it actually takes a long time to migrate. Since Doom Emacs does a lot of things behind the scenes for the features I use. It would take some time for me to implement the current exising features with the correct options enabled. If I were using my own config for Emacs 28.2, it would be a lot quicker (like 2 minutes).

You can read my Vanilla Emacs and Doom Emacs configuration posts.