Updates to LazyVim For Ambitious Developers
My holiday week was spent updating LazyVim for Ambitious Developers to reflect the numerous small changes folke has pushed in the few months since I published the book.
The biggest and hardest change for me was just updating all the which-key screenshots, as whichkey now shows a “helix-style” menu by default. That didn’t impact the content of the book much, though. I also updated the content in several chapters to reflect the fact that fzf.lua is now the default file picker and blink.cmp is the default completions source. I also had a few changes surrounding the extraction of snacks.nvim.
There’s also a bunch of new or drastically rewritten sections. If you’ve already read the entire book, these may still be of interest to you:
I updated the Modifying Existing Options section of Chapter 5 to show an example of adding an entry to the Dashboard. Previously this was an nvim-cmp reference, which doesn’t make sense anymore.
Chapter 9 got a brief section discussing the new zoom and zen modes. I also added the choose session keybinding to the sessions section.
Chapter 13 is getting kind of huge and I may need to split it in two someday. The new content here is a discussion of the text-case plugin.
If your custom snippets aren’t working anymore, it’s because blink.cmp slightly changed the directory layout. I’ve updated the Defining New Snippets section of Chapter 14 so that it works again.
Chapter 16 tells you how to choose a different agent for copilot chat (I recommend Claude), and has an all-new section on Supermaven. I admit I haven’t used Supermaven beyond the initial setup, but it seems fast.
In addition to the web version, I have updated the ebook with the latest content, as that is the version most of you choose to purchase. I haven’t updated the print edition yet, as the page count has changed and I haven’t had time to reformat it.
I also wanted to add a couple more insights that didn’t make it into the book. If you use the Kitty terminal, it now supports built-in cursor trails that make it super easy to track where your cursor moves when you switch windows or do a big jump. I thought these were kind of silly eye candy when I first encountered them in Neovide, but I have found that they make my vim experience much tidier.
I also recently learned about “home row mods” and decided to try them out. The idea is to allow the “tap” and “hold” behaviours of home row keys to be different. If you tap, it types the character on that key, but if you hold it or combine it with another key, it acts as a modifier key. I’ve set my keyboard up with Control under my pinkies, Alt under my ring fingers, Command/Gui under my middle fingers, and shift under my index fingers. I’ve also assigned some common two-mod keypresses such as Control-Alt and Control-Shift to single keys accessible on my index finger. This was fairly easy to do with my Kinesis Advantage 360 Pro and the ZMK firmware. I really love the effect, and wish I’d known about this concept two decades ago when I first started being affected by RSI!
This is how I spend my holidays! If you appreciate it, please do consider showing some financial support.
If you’ve also had holidays this month, I hope they have been amazing, and if not, that you will have something to celebrate soon!
Dusty Phillips