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Comment by riz_

1 year ago

I'm wondering if the author ever tried one of the many neovim distributions, which solve a lot of the problem they're describing. All of the plugins and integrations necessary are already set up to create a nice fully featured IDE-style environment. E.g. LazyVim, AstroVim or NvChad

After years of using Vim as a keyboard assassin, then Neovim (with a custom config initially based on kickstart.nvim), about a month ago I started using LazyVim. After test-driving the default config for just a few hours, I found myself nodding my head and saying to myself, "Yes, this is the way."

I had seen some of the other "Neovim as IDE" projects but after looking at them carefully, I decided that LazyVim is generally the most polished one out there. Folke deserves a lot of credit.

The breakthrough for me was realising that it's a totally acceptable tradeoff to let other developers who know what they're doing, keep up with the bleeding edge plugin scene, and have generally good opinions make decisions about configuration so I can get real work done and not spend time getting bogged down in ricing and config files.

  • I tries LazyVim, but on every startup it nags me about version updates, and :x somehow takes 2-3 seconds extra as well. I don't live in the editor; vim is only useful to me if it starts up and quits instantly.

    • You can disable the update checker with a very simple config change.[0]

      As for :x being slow, I'm not sure what that might be, it certainly isn't the case for me, it quits instantly. Try asking around in their support channels?

      [0]: https://www.lazyvim.org/configuration/lazy.nvim (look for "checker" field)

    • It sounds like you don't have lazy loading enabled. No way it should take that long to start up, and version updates shouldn't be that frequent.

      2 replies →

  • Agreed. I use to switch on and off between vim, neovim and VS Code vim-keybindings until I found AstroVim. When I use AstroVim, I can modify what little I need to knowing the base and foundation is taken care of and I can focus on what matters.

The article specifically mentions following chris@machine, so I would assume that LunarVim was on their radar. But I agree, it seems odd that it wasn't mentioned in the article.

There is also spacevim, which is what I use for remotes when remoting with Zed breaks(which is still quite often at the moment).