You Should Use A Neovim Distro If You Are New

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[anatolyanatoly]

I personally became interested in neovim, after my vscode just started lagging like hell during hackathon. I tried your config, kickstart, configuring my own, but it looked like a mess and was absolutely unaware of what I was doing. Finally I used NVChad for 3 months and then wrote my own config without any problems.
I think starting from the neovim distro may be a good idea. And I use arch, btw.

[jjanx]

to counter prime's argument we don't even really know how vscode plugin system works so using a distro is practically the same

[frogman_]

CLion is my preconfigured distribution

[TechJoltd]

Honestly got to agree with prime here. The problem I have with distributions are that they include too much. There isn't much that is really necessary for editing and writing code. Basically all that is needed is an LSP, a way to browse files (netrw and telescope), and the editor itself. I followed prime's tutorial and got a kinda minimal config with like 5 plugins, and that let me do everything I really needed. Then I was really able to focus on coding and getting a grasp on vim.

[guilhermedasilvavieira]

Neovim should have sane defaults like Helix does

[matthiggins]

Agree completely. I followed your tutorial and it not only made me finally understand "the deal" with vim; starting from scratch and building things up was way more useful. I now know what plugins I have, how to use them, and how to add and configure more.

[raiguard]

This is one of the reasons why I like kakoune so much. The amount of breaking changes over the last several years can be counted on one hand. I wrote a few plugins several years ago and they continue to function just fine. Neovim sounds like javascript in how quickly it evolves, whereas i just want to configure once and then get to work.

[rtachallenger]

My nvim config is a minimal kickstart clone (17 lines),
a series of independent single file plugin configs,
an utilities file (mainly yanked from the LazyVim repo)
and a settings file for custom non-plugin configs and keymaps.
Kickstart is really the best place to start, once you went through the whole repo you already know how to make your own config.

[Iridescence]

Honestly I started with AstroNvim because I hated configuring base, installed two LSPs ant TS from the easy installer and now using it for 3 weeks at work without much problem. Maybe it's not for everyone but it works.

[stugeh]

I did neovim from scratch and then just installed lunarvim and in the year + of using it i dont really see a reason to swap to my own config. I havent had to touch my config in months, updates are always smooth and nothing ever breaks.

edit: 10 months later I'm on my own config because i wanted a more minimalist setup

[youtube.user.]

I personally use a distro, AstroNvim because I want to spend my time writing actual code rather than writing/editing my config files 😅

[hosseines]

I started with vim about 6 years ago, when neovim was just a vim clone (or at least I thought it was), trying to learn bash and shell commands. I learned bash and vim first, then wrote my first program with it😁

and agreed with known the system/environment, I see what knowledge it gave me and it was (actually still is) helpful, from How a compiler works to the syscalls, signals and return statement, and even more.

I googled and wrote my own vimrc, time to time when I saw some useful tricks or plugins, I would add it and use it, I still keep some of keybindings from someone else's vimrc which I saw on a youtube video. and after switching to neovim, when the lua API became a thing and gets much powerful, I ported some of my old habbits (😁) to lua.

Hell of journey which I LOVE and proud😁

btw trying ed is a awesome idea! ed is always installed on my system and love to play with it time to time😁

[friendliness]

I did a bit of a mix here personally, started out with your 0 to lsp series which I really liked and put into its own git branch. Then I took a look at what nvchad did in another branch to see if there was anything I really liked, so played around with that a bit.

Later I integrated some things I liked from nvchad into the config I ended up with thanks to your videos.

I do end up in configuration hell sometimes as the more I see the more I want to customise my vim config 😂 even talking about it now has me wanting to change my configuration again, so I know what I'm doing tomorrow!

[zizouhuweidi]

With lazyvim u get the best of both worlds. You minimise the effort maintaining ur config and you can configure everything like it's your own, documentation is top tier too

[siva]

@Prime, you have done an excellent job by contributing harpoon and git worktree plugins to neovim ecosystem. It will be great if you could spare sometime to maintain those plugins. I like those plugins very much. Thanks!

[moistness]

Agree exactly as an almost beginner. If you're a seasoned neovim enjoyer that doesn't really wanna spend time configuring it, use a distro. If you're a beginner, a distro simply adds to the confusion already present if you're first configuring it, you should stick to something simple that will teach you the basics. I do wish kickstart was more modular, since having a single file for everything is still a bit overwhelming, but I've had a lovely experience with it nonetheless.

[rtsa]

As a beginner, I wholeheartedly agree with the article. Getting started from scratch is overwhelming and time consuming. NvChad just gives me everything I wanted out of the box. If I need further configuration/personalisation, then I can still do that but now I can get developing out of the gate and not spend countless hours reinventing the wheel. I mean why do that when VSCode is right there and completely fine for me?

[airman]

I actually think starting from scratch to understand the guts of neovim is a good idea. Then if you get tired of fiddling with configs switch to a distro. That way you at least understand the internals instead of fully relying on someone else to just “handle” it for you.

[sourcedecay]

I had been running vim since 2000 with an 8 line vimrc. Picked up neovim about a month ago, installed Chad, and now I'm ripping it apart and making it my own. Learning a ton about how plugins do what they do and I'd be fairly comfortable writing a small one at this point. Using a distro gave me a good idea of what I could do with neovim. Before long, there won't be many remnants of chad left.

[kerimovkhikmet]

Prime KickStart sounds great, really would love to see it.