Just wondering: how would you characterize the general feel of the different nvim flavours: LazyVim, Chad, Astro, etc.? I’m not thinking functionality, which plugins are included, etc., but the way they feel when one uses them.
I tried out a whole bunch of them, as per Elijah Manor’s excellent video about config switching (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkHjJlSgKZY)
I figured out LazyVim is trying its best not to look and feel like vim, with modal windows and fancy graphics and all. I didn’t like that. I can’t remember why I left Astro behind, but I finally settled on Chad, which at first I disliked because of the name, but eventually I figured out that that was the flavour for me: so many things just worked as expected, and there were so many times when I looked up something, and went: “Hm! That was quite smart, actually!”
So that’s where I’m at – and purely for “feel” reasons. So: convince me: what am I missing when I don’t use bundle B or config C?
Not much. I don’t use any bundles myself and never have FOMO. I sometimes copy configurations from big projects like Chad and Lazy if I see a clever way they added in certain visual aspect (bufferline, statusbar etc.); one can also see their plugin list for ideas. I figure by doing it yourself, it’s easier to maintain and learn the plugin functions/keybindings that way. The approach I take is (1) learn default nvim -> (2) understand what each plugin adds to the default functionality -> (3) install and tweak what you need to create your own ecosystem. But maybe it’s a bit geeky and time consuming.
TL;DR: you’re not missing out much, check in with recent commits from different projects if you want to steal new ideas, or just hang around neovim communities.
That’s my ideal as well – the distant goal that “one of these days, I am going to sit down and fix my config the way I really want it”. But then time comes in the way, and I just copy something from somewhere…
Emacs user here, but this is basically what I did as well, learnt a lot from the doom-emacs configuration and am using their modeline directly, but without the heft of extra, unnecessary utilities
I currently use Astro at the moment but have some issues with it. I started to use kickstart, which is not a bundle actually but some kind of minimal configuration. I like it for my personal projects but it doesn’t work at all for the C# .NET project from work. Unfortunately I don’t have the time nor do I want to invest the time to configure most of the things myself, but I do see a lot of merit in doing so. I personally learned a lot of additional built-in commands and features from “vanilla” neovim by using kickstart that I don’t regret it at all for trying out.
I just switched from LunarVim to NvChad and it’s a nicer DX out of the box to me for frontend dev (convert from vscode). Though i find the lunarvim key mappings more intuitive.
The config paradigm in nvchad makes more sense to me than it does with lunarvim too.
Bit both are pretty cool 😎
