Thanks for sharing your nvim journey! 😊
The first part until you branched of into nvim feels really relatable to me: using terminal + JetBrains IDE, shortcuts, plugins and only using the mouse when there is other way. I took that a step further and customized the appearance, using the zen mode from time to time, writing powershell and bash scripts, even using Jira through the terminal and custom keyboard mappings with a ergonomic keyboard (moonlander). The keyboard allows me to have almost every key accessable without leaving the the default f-j position.
And with that said, I am not sure if switching to nvim would really be a big benefit for me. One part of me really wants to try nvim though, but I can't yet justify to myself taking that initial performance hit. Also in these nvim articles I always miss the part about debugging and manual testing, which is also a very important part of my job and I fear that this would be less convenient in nvim than with the great tooling my comfort zone IDE provides. How was your debugging experience so far and are you missing any features that you had in IntelliJ? What about the refactoring shortcuts for example? Extract into method, rename, safe delete and so on, is that easily possible in nvim too?