vim config pruning and tentative migration.

It’s time to revisit vim

Every year or so, I go through my .vimrc with a more critical eye, adding and purging configurations that were once useful but have become obsolete.

This year’s cleanup comes with additional factors that may transform this routine refactoring into a full coding platform or IDE modernization migration.

My main motivation: exploring AI coding agents

I haven’t tried any coding agents yet, mainly due to lacking time to investigate and implement the necessary integrations, combined with it’s still early days for AI development tools.

Additionally, we had our yearly work on-site this past week. After various chats with my peers and a couple of edicts from above, I’ve decided to finally evaluate an AI coding agent and integrate it into my development workflow.

To date, the only AI I’ve been forced to use (and that I’m consciously aware of using) has been whatever Google throws at me when I search for something while coding.

From my experience, it’s been hit or miss but ultimately informed by my Google search query and its results, so at least the source is as good as what you’re going to get without it.

I’ve found myself reading the AI blurb quickly to discern if there’s any useful information before scrolling through the search results. The AI summary does provide a good overview, though sometimes it can be wrong, or might combine two pieces of information that are correct individually but incorrect when combined.

Development Environment Choices: keeping it simple

Given that AI integration is top of mind, I’m limiting my input variables to make my IDE choice fairly obvious.

At work, we’re only allowed to use a handful of AI agents: Windsurf, OpenCode, and Gemini 🙄. From chatting with my peers, it seems that Windsurf is OK but not great. The consensus is that OpenCode is the best coding agent available.

With Windsurf out of the picture and me currently using vim, I’d prefer to stay with vim. Unfortunately, there’s no plugin that would integrate OpenCode with it.

However, there is neovim!

I tried neovim in the past, and while I did like the features it provided, at the time there was nothing in neovim that vim couldn’t offer for my workflow. Also, although I could port my .vimrc to neovim directly into an init.vim file, the preferred way to configure things in neovim is with lua, which I had no real interest in learning. So, as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Fast forward to today: I want an AI integration plugin. This is the impetus I needed to give neovim a proper try.

Given my current situation, neovim would maintain the same “feel” as my current vim environment. I can port my existing .vimrc to neovim to ensure a smooth landing point during migration, and I’ll have the option to add the opencode.nvim plugin once I’m fully set up.

I don’t need to try out a slew of other IDEs; instead, I can continue using something that feels familiar and isn’t far from what I’m currently using.

vim does have some AI coding plugins available, mainly Windsurf since it’s whitelisted, but others exist as well. Unfortunately, none support OpenCode.

It’s a new day with neovim!

Time to dust off the .vimrc, import it into neovim, and give it a whirl! I’ll be writing about my experience with neovim, integrating and pruning my old .vimrc, and adding the opencode.nvim plugin. I suspect I’ll be pruning my .vimrc much more aggressively than I would have if I stayed with vim, mainly because there may be better native neovim plugins than the ones I used in vim, but also because there may be incompatibilities with certain plugins I’m currently using.

I’ve been putting off moving away from vim for quite some time because it works for me and there hasn’t been a compelling reason until now. I know many IDEs have “vim motion” plugins that have enticed me enough to give them a try (looking at you, vscode), but having tried some in the past, they aren’t quite the same and are missing some things that made vim hard to beat. neovim has been touted as the better vim by some, and while vim did catch up a bit in version 9.x, neovim still has an edge.

Time to try it out for myself.