I’m working on a new book! This one will be published online with plenty of begging for support on my Patreon. If there is sufficient interest, I’m planning physical and ebook editions later this year.

LazyVim for Ambitious developers is a book for the modal-editor-curious out there. Vim and Neovim have a reputation for being hard to learn and configure. LazyVim really negates that reputation, but its documentation still assumes that you have a lot of prior knowledge with Vim and Neovim.

I started using LazyVim after giving up on the Helix editor last year sometime. Returning to Neovim was a wonderful experience, but since Helix had already broken decades of Vim muscle memory, I figured I may as well return to Neovim using one of these fancy new distros. I chose LazyVim out of an abundance of respect for its maintainer and because it actually makes it possible to have an out-of-the-box configuration that just works but also customize it.

Anyway, at some point, I decided that everyone should have access to the joy of using LazyVim, so I started to write a book on it.

And now I’m ready to share it! The first draft of the book is complete, though I have a few ideas for extra chapters I’ll be adding. I’ve edited down the first three chapters and published them on this microsite.

Over the coming weeks, I will edit the remaining chapters. These will be published to my Patreon account as they are completed, and will show up on the public website at least one week after they are published to Patreon.

This post is mostly to share that the book is (partially) available, but I do want to talk a bit about the microsite:

I wrote it all by myself. I’m sure that isn’t terribly impressive since I’ve been building websites since 1999. The difference with this one is that it doesn’t look (completely) like shit. I’ve always been able to take a designer’s input and turn it into a site, but this is the first time I’ve been able to design something myself without giving up in tears and I wanted to give some credit.

First of all, a huge shout-out to Open Props, which is “what tailwind should have been all along.” It takes away a lot of styling decisions, and trust me, you don’t want me making styling decisions.

Second, I recently read the ebook Refactoring UI which was… well it sure as hell wasn’t worth the $100 USD purchase price, but it provides a lot of actionable hints that I don’t know how else I wold have acquired. It hasn’t turned me into a designer, but my defaults are a little more informed. I have trouble recommending this book because the steep price feels like a rip-off considering there are no dead trees involved (I’m weirdly old school when it comes to books: for $100 I want a leather-bound full-colour edition with edge gilding). The content is valuable though. But if it’s worth $100 then LazyVim for Ambitious Developers will be worth $200, and… well I simply won’t tell you how much to sponsor me on Patreon in case I’m underselling myself!

Anything you don’t like about the site design is in spite of, and not because of either of these resources. I was going for “friendly and open”, and if I didn’t hit that, well at least it isn’t Comic Sans MS.

I even put a (small) amount of effort into responsive design and it renders “ok” on mobile. And it respects dark mode system preference.

The site is written in Svelte and SvelteKit, which I still love. I’m using mdsvex for the individual chapters and oh my god is it an amazing marriage of Markdown and Svelte. It’s mdx inspired, but it is so much better. I can put Svelte components right in my Markdown without thinking!

The site, like all my static sites, is hosted by the excellent folks (ok, I only assume they are excellent. I don’t know them personally, but I love their product, and most excellent products are built by excellent people) at Render.com.

I know I’ve mentioned it too many times in this article, but I do want to highlight the Patreon thing again: I am currently on sabbatical / unemployed / starting a company (I am never 100% clear which it is), and therefore not generating any income. This book would NOT have happened if I had a day job, and if you can help make it worth my while, I will be ever-so-grateful. I can also be sponsored on Github.