Neovim in practice: a hands-on guide to LazyVim to truly get started

There is something seemingly anachronistic about choosing, in 2026, an editor who lives in the terminal. And yet, for many, it is a choice that makes more sense today than it did ten years ago. This guide explains why — and, above all, how to start using Neovim productively with LazyVim, without getting lost in configuration.

Why still use Neovim in 2026

Why still use a terminal editor when there are powerful IDEs, polished graphical interfaces, and ready-made development environments? The answer is not nostalgia, nor a cult of difficulty. It is control .

A terminal editor is lightweight, starts istantlyt, and uses few resources. It is portable: the same tool works on your computer, on a server reached over SSH, inside a container. And it is reproducible: the configuration is made of plain-text files that you can version and recreate identically on any machine. In an era when many tools tend to move logic and data toward the cloud, a fully local and transparent editor is a concrete form of autonomy.

In this sense, Neovim is not a fallback but a deliberate choice, particularly sensible for those who work every day with text, code, Markdown, configuration files, and servers. It does not aim to turn you into a Vim expert: the goal of this guide is to give you the bare minimum to be productive right away, relying on LazyVim, a ready-made configuration that avoids starting from scratch.

What Neovim is#

Neovim is a modal, open-source text editor that runs in the terminal. It is the heir of Vim, whose philosophy it preserves, but with a modern architecture.

Its distinguishing feature is modal editing. In conventional editors, you are always typing, and you act on the text through shortcuts with modifier keys. In Neovim, by contrast, there are several modes, and the same key performs different actions depending on which one is active: in one you type, in another you move around and manipulate the document, in another you select blocks or issue commands.

There is therefore a clear difference between typing text and commanding the editor, and these are two activities that happen at distinct moments. It feels counterintuitive at first, but it is precisely this separation that changes your relationship with the text: freed from the job of inserting characters, the keys become a small language for editing the document with precision and speed.

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