Stop Using Heavy IDEs: My 2026 LazyVim Setup

Stop letting your development tools intent your system performance. If your local workspace requires multiple gigabytes of memory just to edit text and run a few terminal commands, it’s time for a change.

Welcome to the first installment of my LazyVim series. Today, we are stripping away the bloated UI layers and building a mouse-free, hyper-optimized development environment right inside the terminal. Whether you’re looking to reclaim your system resources, speed up your engineering velocity, or finally master a keyboard-driven workflow, this step-by-step guide will take you from an empty configuration file to a fully capable, modern development machine.

Why I Left Traditional IDEs Behind

To be honest, I used to be a massive fan of VSCode. It is incredibly sleek out of the box, and features like multi-cursor editing and quick-fix commands made my coding workflow feel great.

However, things started falling apart when my project workload grew. As a DevOps engineer, my daily routine involves juggling multiple heavy repositories, infrastructure workspaces, and complex pipelines simultaneously. Running all of that in a traditional desktop editor quickly turned my local machine into a laggy, resource-heavy bottleneck.

That was the turning point that forced me to research alternatives. Since my role already requires me to spend a major chunk of my time using standard Vim directly on remote staging and production servers, moving my local environment to the terminal felt like a natural next step. That is when I discovered NeoVim and the sheer speed and efficiency of the LazyVim ecosystem completely blew me away.

Prequensites

NeoVim Setting ups

So many way to install neovim, it’s up to you. check it out here

# linux x86
curl -LO https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/download/nightly/nvim-macos-x86_64.tar.gz
tar xzf nvim-macos-x86_64.tar.gz
./nvim-macos-x86_64/bin/nvim

# linux arm
curl -LO https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/download/nightly/nvim-macos-arm64.tar.gz
tar xzf nvim-macos-arm64.tar.gz
./nvim-macos-arm64/bin/nvim

# macos
brew install neovim

Where are configurations stored ?

NeoVim follows standard operating system directory patterns. Depending on what machine you are using, your configuration files are stored in the following folders:

~/.config/nvim/
├── lua/
│   ├── config/
│   │   ├── keymaps.lua   # Your custom shortcuts (like Ctrl+b)
│   │   ├── lazy.lua      # Core plugin manager bootstrapper
│   │   └── options.lua   # Global settings (like relative line numbers)
│   └── plugins/
│       ├── nvim-surround.lua  # Your custom plugin overrides!
│       └── example.lua
├── init.lua              # The main entrypoint file NeoVim reads first
└── lazy-lock.json        # Keeps track of the exact versions of plugins installed

LazyVim Setting ups

install from scratch

Make a backup of your current Neovim files:

# required
mv ~/.config/nvim{,.bak}
# optional but recommended
mv ~/.local/share/nvim{,.bak}
mv ~/.local/state/nvim{,.bak}
mv ~/.cache/nvim{,.bak}

Clone the starter & remove .git folder, so you can add it your own repo latert

git clone https://github.com/LazyVim/starter ~/.config/nvim
rm -rf ~/.config/nvim/.git

clone my dotfiles for setting ups

Step 1 - First, open your terminal and clone your repository to a folder on your machine (for example, right in your home directory or a projects folder):

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/songhanpoo/dotfiles.git
cd dotfiles

Step 2 - If you already have a working LazyVim layout set up locally, let’s move it out of the hidden standard directory and put it directly inside your new dotfiles folder:

# Create a destination directory inside your repo
mkdir -p ~/dotfiles/nvim

# Copy or move your existing custom configs into the repo folder
cp -r ~/.config/nvim/* ~/dotfiles/nvim/

Step 3 - NeoVim only looks at ~/.config/nvim/ to run. To make it read your repo files instead, we create a symlink (a shortcut link between folders):

# Back up your old native folder just in case
mv ~/.config/nvim ~/.config/nvim.bak

# Create a symlink pointing from your system to your repository folder
ln -s ~/dotfiles/colorscheme ~/.config/colorscheme
ln -s ~/dotfiles/ghostty ~/.config/ghostty
ln -s ~/dotfiles/nvim ~/.config/nvim
ln -s ~/dotfiles/skhd ~/.config/skhd
ln -s ~/dotfiles/tmux/tmux.conf ~/.tmux.conf
ln -s ~/dotfiles/yabai ~/.config/yabai
ln -s ~/dotfiles/yazi ~/.config/yazi

Happy Coding