I’m always vacillating between editors. A lot of times I get lazy and live inside Visual Studio Code. A lot of time I will fire up vim because I just want to do some code editing without the excess baggage, and if I need to do another task while writing in Rust for example I’ll open another console to perform that task, such as executing cargo build or cargo run. Sometimes I’ll even fire up an up-to-date version of Emacs, up-to-date as defined by me pulling the latest sources and building it myself.

For about a year now I’ve been using neovim ( https://github.com/neovim/neovim ) since it hit version 0.8.0. Furthermore I have my neovim configured with AstroNvim ( https://astronvim.com/ ) with no changes. Works fine for what I want and need. I have neovim installed everywhere, from Linux Mint to all my MacBook Pros, and even to my lowly Raspberry Pi 5. The big difference between the Pi and every other system is that there is no prebuilt binary for aarch64 on the Raspberry Pi. So I pulled down the sources and successfully built it.

The directions for building neovim are clear enough that even a retired old trained monkey such as myself can successfully build and deploy a working copy. If you can read and follow directions then you’re golden. I knew this wasn’t going to be a problem because I build neovim 0.9.5 for Ubuntu 23.10 when it was running on my Pi. And before you ask, yes, you can have apt install neovim 0.9.5 and be done with it. But 0.10.0 has been out for a while now, and as I always want the latest stable release, and Ubuntu is notorious for only installing whatever versions it had when it was officially released, I just built it.

Building neovim took all of about five minutes. In the grand scheme of things that’s nothing. And because I built it I now have another up-to-date tool in my toolbox that makes code development, dare I say it, fun.