Learn to RTFM!

2025-08-13
vim neovim productivity

I spent a bunch of time unemployed this year (thanks redundancy). So I redid my dotfiles. Goodbye AstroNvim, hello init.lua. I had two motivations for doing this:

1. I didn't understand what AstroNvim was doing to implement all this functionality, and when I wanted to add new things I always found it confusing.
2. Vimothée Chalamet reignited my love for Vim and it's myriad of well thought out and modular features.

Now I am running nightly Neovim, using the inbuilt package manager for a select few plugins and I have a single init.lua which I constructed entirely myself. And the thing that enabled me was :h.

:h is (neo)vim's inbuilt help command. Typing :h i brings up some very extensive documentation about what the i character does, and it puts it in the context of other similar commands. Obviously I knew about :h before, but I never really understood how to parse the information that was on my screen.

Having now written a little bit of lua and done some fiddling with a full config myself, these :h pages are a goldmine. The combination of having extremely detailed docs for a specific command, surrounded by other similar commands is incredible. Want to know how to open a terminal buffer? :h terminal. Read a few sentences and scroll a bit and now you know how to open a terminal buffer and what the keybinds are to perform actions in it. All of that, for free, built into your editor, and it's completely offline.

I now feel much more confident with configuring my editor and I rarely feel like I have to consult a search engine to get my answers. I wish I'd invested in this skill sooner, I could've saved myself so much time.

You should learn to read the manual for your favourite tools too.