First of all, when you close your “modern” IDE, then reopen it and open a project, what do you get? An empty editor. It doesn’t recover the old files, layouts, and tabs you had before closing the IDE. Yes, it stores the recent files list, and under the “File” submenu, you have another submenu, “Recent,” from which you can open your recent files.

But after opening an old file, what do you get? Your cursor is at the beginning of the file instead of being at the last position where you edited it. This is absurd. Modern IDEs shouldn’t be this clunky regarding simple yet essential things.

On the other hand, what do you get in Vim or NeoVim? Either you start your config from scratch and add support for this kind of stuff, or you use a preconfigured Vim/NeoVim distribution such as LazyVim, which has already been configured not to act like a dumb piece of brick in these situations. Try to configure your “modern” IDE or edit the source code and recompile it so it doesn’t act like a brick. Good luck :d

Probably you didn’t even notice how easy life can be with the simple intelligence of your development environment, right? Maybe even now you can’t imagine it. You first need to work in a truly professional development environment, then try to go back to “modern” IDEs to understand and feel the difference.

Vim and NeoVim save your cursor locations to registers. These registers are saved in the cache automatically, so after closing and reopening the editor, you don’t lose them. I have a simple autocmd - in the Vim world, this is the equivalent of an event listener - which gets executed every time I open a file, finds my cursor’s last position from the registers, and moves my cursor to that position.

Furthermore, in the Vim world, you can save your session to a file. That session file consists of simple Vim commands which open the saved windows, buffers, and tabs exactly as you saved them. I have autocmds to store the session before closing a project and reload the session after opening a project. To navigate projects, I use a plugin which simply gives me the ability to save a directory list, edit that list, and cd into any of them. Right after the cd, the “project opened autocmd” gets executed. Right before the cd and before exiting Vim, the “project closed autocmd” gets executed. And that plugin supports fuzzy finders such as FzfLua and Telescope.

Furthermore, do you remember the magic of fuzzy searching? FzfLua, a great NeoVim plugin, supports fuzzy searching worktrees of the repo and navigating between them.

I quickly navigate projects and worktrees without losing the state of my editor. When I open a project, every window and every tab is in the same place as I left it, with the same cursor position and the same layout.

Does your IDE allow you to edit the same file in two different splits in different parts at the same time?