I Left Neovim for Cursor. Here’s Why I’m Back in 2026 Using Lazyvim.

Last year I took a break from Neovim and switched to Cursor. I couldn’t ignore the hype around it and I’m glad I switched. Cursor has been a great Editor for me and allowed me to experiment working with AI. It’s helped me be extremely productive at work.

However, there has been this small but growing itch in my brain to get back to Neovim.

My config had become a jumble of different plugins and settings which had been stuck together over the months and years I had been working with the editor.

It’s 2026 and time for a fresh start! I’d seen a fair bit of love in the community about Lazyvim, so decided to give it a try.

Here are my first impressions and whether I will continue using it.

Getting Started

I used the recommended video shown on the Lazyvim landing page to get started. I also followed the docs too.

Initially my neovim version was out of date so I updated with Homebrew. (Can I just give a shoutout to Homebrew here. It’s been so reliable and useful for me over the years. This is how software should be in my opinion, just quietly going about its job, being super helpful and super reliable.) I needed version 11.2 or above in order to install Lazyvim.

Is this a good thing or not? Well it depends. The more plugins included the more you can do with Neovim but on the other side the greater the learning curve.

Themes

The default theme is fine and it’s super easy to change the theme. There are a bunch to choose from. Just press <leader>uC and you can choose a different there. Nice! My goto at the moment is “catppucin-mocha”.

Moving Around

Lazyvim uses Vim motions and comes with preconfigured keymaps that make it easy to split screens and then move around between them.

<leader>| to split vertically and <leader>- to split horizontally. You can navigate around different windows with ctrl + h or j or k or l depending if you want to go left, down, up or right.

When you’re in a window with many buffers open (similar to tabs in VsCode) you can press shift + h or l to move left or right amongst these buffers.

It’s really easily to remember these compared to weird and wonderful keymaps I’ve used in the past so navigating around is as simple as you’re going to get.

Copying And Pasting

This was a massive source of frustration in the past but with Lazyvim they have introduced some nice plugins that make this whole process easier.

It seems to be that Yanking — y — copies the contents to the global clipboard (thank youh!!!) so you can paste the copied value outside of the current session of Neovim. This was something that really troubled me in the past.

Also with global find and replace they have a plugin called nvim-spectre. Using the keymap: <leader>sr it brings up this intuitive “Find and Replace” panel.

Press enter or click to view image in full sizenvim-spectre find and replace panel

It has filters to search only certain file type and then different paths.

Git

Lazyvim comes with Lazygit. This makes me very happy. I have been using Lazygit for a while now and love it. Its very easy to use and gives you all the git commands you would ever need in a nice intuitive terminal UI.

<leader>gg brings up Lazygit in a popup window and then you can q out of it once you’ve finished. Really slick.

LSPs

Lazyvim doesn’t come with many LSPs installed initially. They are relatively easy to install. For example I wanted it for “Go” so I added this line to the Lazy.lua file.

{ import = "lazyvim.plugins.extras.lang.go" }

Lazyvim comes with Mason. This helps you easily manage and install LSPs so you have that option too.

Keymaps

Lazyvim comes with the which-key plugin. This has proved remarkably useful as I realised I forgot many of the default keymaps in Neovim. I am relearning them whilst auto adding a few of my custom keymaps.

Also with the amount of plugins that come with Lazyvim there are a bunch of keymaps I will have to learn off fresh so which-key really helps with this too.

AI Workflow

This is where I thought the whole Neovim experience would really suffers against editors like Cursor. The Cursor AI assistant experience is so smooth and so useful I have really grown attached to it.

Little things like selecting a line of code and pressing cmd + i to have that referenced in the AI Agent chat is a must for me. I like AI to help me at parts I get stuck on or to help me understand small parts of code.

I have tried a couple of plugins so far:

• Supermaven — which seems to replicate what the tab feature does in Cursor.
• Opencode — which is an open source AI Coding agent. Great for generating chunks of code, writing tests and also explaining code. Although the UX for me so far is not as slick as Cursor, but this could just be me needing to learn how to use the tool better.
• Avante — This seems to be the closest I can find to the cmd + i feature in Cursor. I have just started playing with it so early days but it looks promising. I am using the Anthropic Opus 4.5 model so let’s see. I will write a whole blog post about this I think.

Worthy Mentions

There are a few other things that I want to highlight here that I really liked in Lazyvim:

• Leap plugin: https://www.lazyvim.org/extras/editor/leap is a great way to navigate to a specific part in a file — Neovim’s answer to the mouse. s followed by the search pattern.
• Todo plugin: https://github.com/folke/todo-comments.nvim find all your “todo” comments in a codebase.
• Trouble plugin: https://github.com/folke/trouble.nvim opens up a nice panel for you to see a list of current errors and warnings in the current file using <leader>xx

Conclusion

Why do I keep coming back to Neovim? I think it’s the ingenuity and experience you get when you start piecing together all the great plugins available in the ecosystem.

In terms of pure editor experience, once you get over the large learning curve, you start to move around code in a way you just can’t in other code editors. This sounds a bit cheesy but I believe this is the reason why.

We are humans after all and feelings and emotions are a large part of our setup — they should be followed and not ignored.

Lazyvim brings some really nice plugins together to great a really nice experience. So far I’ve only had to tweak a few things to improve the experience for me.

I wouldn’t recommend Lazyvim to completely new users of Vim/Neovim — I think it’s too much. I think it is easier to learn the basic vim motions in a simple version of Neovim. However, if you are a little familiar with Vim/Neovim already then I highly recommend it.

I am already using Neovim for part of my day to day editing experience and plan to increase this usage over 2026.

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