kakoune-lsp VS LunarVim

Kakoune with LSP (gopls).

You could dive into installing kak-lsp, which will provide the code intelligence features you want. Kakoune doesn't do windowing on it's own, so your going to need to rely on something like tmux or a terminal emulator that does similar, such as wezterm, or even a tiling window manager (which is what is being used in the video). Kakoune really needs a lot of time invested to configure well though.

Why do you need vscode? Kakoune supports code actions, so this should work in the editor with the best editing model ever. See lsp-code-actions from https://github.com/kak-lsp/kak-lsp.

In addition, rather than using its own full-fledged programming language for plugins or choosing to use a specific programming language, it provides a limited configuration language that's closer to a domain-specific language and to be used as a "glue" between Kakoune and programs written in any language. For example, the kak-lsp plugin uses a program written in Rust that is integrated with Kakoune with a thin wrapper of Kakoune's configuration language.

If you're having problems with these capabilities, try to look at the kak-lsp debug output: https://github.com/kak-lsp/kak-lsp#troubleshooting

kak-lsp doesn't print to *debug* under normal operation. If you want to check on kak-lsp, enable verbose logging as described here and tail -f the log file.

So, since pretty much everything happens through a shell, you can use anything that produces an executable to write your logic. kak-lsp, for example, is written in Rust, with some kakscript to define the commands, hooks and options a user needs to interface with it.

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 .