Comment by alwillis

> I always thought Vim/Nvim already had a built-in package manager

They do; I used minpac [1] back in the day with Vim. And now Neovim has vim.pack.

Every so often, a movement to create Vim and Neovim configurations with zero (or minimal) 3rd party plugins becomes popular. This means no lazyvim as the package manager.

The lazyvim package manager has all the bells and whistles, especially lazy loading plugins, which reduces Neovim's startup time if you have dozens of plugins installed. My LazyVim [2] configuration has 35 plugins total but only 6 load at startup; startup time: 76ms. Plugins you don't use often aren't loaded unless necessary.

[1]: http://vimcasts.org/episodes/minpac/

[2]: https://www.lazyvim.org