Tom MacWright

2025@macwright.com

Searching for the perfect neovim setup

I haven't found the perfect setup yet, but here's what's been working recently:

  • PragmataPro Mono Liga is the fancy, sort-of-expensive programming font that I've been using for the last four years. It's working great. Sometimes there are exotic nerd font icons it lacks, but that is an acceptable issue: mostly nerd fonts are a thorn in my side and I try to turn those icons off in all the software I can.
  • I switch between vim-paper and catpuccin as my Neovim themes. Mostly vim-paper lately, which is a light-background theme with minimal color variation. With how fancy neovim is getting, it's hard to find themes that support all the highlight groups.
  • I've been using LazyVim but with some features turned off: alpha, headlines, bufferline, render-markdown, and pairs I turn off. I add oil for a super simple file browser, noneckpain to center my buffers, and gitlinker to get permalinks to line ranges of code.
  • The main struggles right now are about toggling code formatting on & off, and when vstls starts getting out of sync with the TypeScript language server. As I mentioned in my Zed review, the difficulty of developing TypeScript code outside of VS Code is mostly Microsoft's fault, not the fault of open source maintainers.