LunarVim VS kickstart.nvim

LunarVim

I would suggest to start getting into vim by first trying out popular vim keybinding plugins available on your favorite code editor and get used to those first. Then, if you want to dive deeper into the power of Neovim, try out popular configs like LazyVim, LunarVim, NvChad... Taking Neovim from a mere text editor to a full-featured IDE with features like intellisense, debugging, testing, etc... on your own takes quite a lot of work and configuration.

I used Helix for a while due to its support for LSP out-of-the-box, which my Vim config at the time couldn't live up to. I switched back to NeoVim after finding LunarVim[1] which had everything I was trying to get setup in my own config.

[1] https://www.lunarvim.org/

I'll admit I didn't look into it, but Helix sounds like something like LunarVim (https://www.lunarvim.org/)

Personally I much prefer that the editor NOT ship with something like that by default, especially when it's so easy to set up. I have several different vim config I use, including a pretty bare-bones one for headless systems, and I much prefer the ability to customize something very specifically.

Build tools that can compose together, rather than a single do-it-all tool. That is the power of the low level editors vs IDE's.

I can't comment on any implementation details, but at least with LunarVim (which I use for daily coding), a slowdown when interacting with LSP is very noticeable. Some others have attested to this on a GitHub issue.

I'm not doubting your experiences with the lack of a slowdown, but there is truth that others do experience it. That might be more of a problem with LunarVim itself rather than Vim, but how likely am I (as someone who would like to avoid what he calls "config hell") or other newcomers to avoid whatever pitfalls there are, if a distribution designed for ease of use by people who know better fall into them?

https://github.com/LunarVim/LunarVim/discussions/3359

Anyways, although i have not used them, LazyVim and LunarVim comes highly recommended. You can try these and see what suits you .

Out of the box it offers almost nothing, but after 7 years of development I like that. I love the idea of customizing to my needs my IDE, so with the help of kickstart.nvim I have with 1 minute of installing and 10 extra minutes of configuration a complete IDE.

I recently started coding with Neovim using kickstart.nvim as the template for my editor configuration. I downloaded the python-lsp-server package using Mason, but I was disappointed to discover that the IntelliSense on my third party dependencies didn't work. The LSP was resolving to my global Python installation, which did not have the packages from my virtual environment (venv) installed.

First thing I did was get kickstart.nvim. I had heard it was extremely useful (and it was). It was very easy to install. I start reading through init.lua, and it told me to run :Tutor, which is almost 1,000 lines of learning how to use Neovim, to which I obviously ran that command and started reading. Obviously, it takes a bit of time to complete :Tutor, but it's well worth it. "hjkl" wasn't too hard to get used to, also repeating motions by using numbers was useful, such as using '5dd' to delete 5 lines. I highly suggest reading this file, especially since I didn't really know about the different modes, which is probably why I failed to switch the other times. You would start writing your code, then Neovim would say that it can't find that command, you would accidently type an i and then start typing, and so on, it was a nightmare. For those that don't know the modes, here is each mode and how to get between them.

I also suggest against using distributions. Instead of learning how to configure nvim itself you're learning to configure that specific distro.

I suggest to take someone's lua config and start from there. Kickstart.nvim is a good one: https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim

1) the option I wouldn’t chose, use Kickstarter. It’s a minimal starter config, using a single init.lua that helps you build a config slowly. https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim

I highly recommend Lazyvim for if you want to have a VSCode (ish) like experience that still exposes you to configuring in Lua. Or Kickstart.nvim if you want a more "from scratch" experience

In case it is helpful, I am using kickstart.nvim with only minor modifications.

One of the project goals is to become something like kickstart.nvim. Or, to be a reference if someone doesn't know how to do something.