Why I switched from Neovim to Sublime Text
In a recent article, I explained my preference for IDEs over text editors. In short, an IDE has all the features you could ever ask for, and they’re all tighly integrated. Text editors, while they give you choice, you have to spend a lot of your time searching for plugins, and these plugins might not work well together. But, my switch was only made for a few reasons, which I’ll list here.
Reason One: You need a plugin for everything
Neovim ships in a state akin to Notepad, just that it uses keys instead of your mouse. In fact, to begin to install all your favorite plugins, you first have to install a package manager. I used this thing called Lazy. But at first, I ran into issues. Neovim kept complaining that it couldn’t use my internet connection to download these programs it needed from GitHub. And, in fact, I spent a few days manually installing the things Neovim was asking for, because Lazy wouldn’t function correctly if I didn’t. But then I installed those things that Neovim needed in the wrong directories, so I had to move those files and folders around to a place where Neovim could see them. But, in the end, after I got Lazy to work, Lazy made Neovim blue for me. It worked fine. But red error messages still appeared when I entered Neovim, again related to how it couldn’t install something because of my internet(my internet isn’t bad, I can literally play Guilty Gear Strive on Xbox Cloud Gaming using it), and the error messages were annoying, but I could ignore them because my editor worked.
The package manager, however, did not. I couldn’t just install plugins using a command like Packer or Lazy(Packer was a package manager I got from following some Neovim tutorial) because I got some error about how Packer wasn’t a Neovim command. And after what it took to get Packer or Lazy working(going into my nvim-data directory and git installing all kinds of things), I didn’t want to fix this error. All in all, because my package managers weren’t working, I had to manually install them with Git, but I don’t even know Neovim, or how it manages files, so you can imagine how that went.
Reason Two: Neovim kept freezing
This was actually the reason I switched. At random intervals, after a few days of Neovim being open, it began to freeze. And I could not make it stop. It wasn’t an error displayed to me via Neovim itself. It just randomly started slowing down, then freezing, and the only way to make it stop was to close and reopen Neovim. Sublime Text, however, ran perfectly fine on my system and had no such issues. Also, it came with autocompletion, great syntax highlighting, and a file tree viewer, things Neovim did not. And I didn’t have to install a single plugin to use these features.
