kickstart.nvim VS LazyVim

Compare kickstart.nvim vs LazyVim and see what are their differences.

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Nutrient – The #1 PDF SDK Library, trusted by 10K+ developers
Other PDF SDKs promise a lot - then break. Laggy scrolling, poor mobile UX, tons of bugs, and lack of support cost you endless frustrations. Nutrient’s SDK handles billion-page workloads - so you don’t have to debug PDFs. Used by ~1 billion end users in more than 150 different countries.
www.nutrient.io
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kickstart.nvim LazyVim
298 83
21,684 19,176
4.2% 3.2%
8.5 9.9
30 days ago 4 days ago
Lua Lua
MIT License Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

kickstart.nvim

Posts with mentions or reviews of kickstart.nvim. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-02-05.
  • Switching Fully to Neovim
    9 projects | dev.to | 5 Feb 2025
    My configuration was inspired by several great sources, including lazyvim starter, ThePrimeagen’s dotfiles, kickstart.nvim, and Typecraft’s Rails config. These provided a strong foundation that I’ve adapted to fit my workflow.
  • I Miss Vim
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Feb 2025
    https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim single file config in lua with the essentials. Some of the article still rings true though.
  • Tips to learn Programming by a Non-Ex FAANG (with only 2 months exp of course)
    1 project | dev.to | 1 Jan 2025
    Word of caution though, if you are a tinker like me you might want to stay away from vim (or VS Code plugins) or you might lose a month of learning time as you configure everything. I mean I did deep learn my editor and lua so I cannot complain too much. If you want to still use vim or neovim then use kickstart for vim and leave the configuring alone for now.
  • So You Want to Write Java in Neovim
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Dec 2024
    I believe that the Neovim Kickstart project gives you Telescope as the fuzzy finder. (The YouTube video by TJ is linked in the README.)

    https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim

  • [SOLVED] Vue 3 + TypeScript + Inlay Hint support in NeoVim
    6 projects | dev.to | 18 Nov 2024
    Since you asked so nicely, sure. Here are the volar and ts_ls server configs for nvim-lspconfig. If you're using something like kickstart.nvim, you'll want to add these entries to your servers table:
  • Neovim, but it’s in Windows
    2 projects | dev.to | 26 Jul 2024
    git clone https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim.git $env:LOCALAPPDATA\nvim\
  • An Experienced (Neo)Vimmer's Workflow
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jun 2024
    For casual users like me, I find Kickstart (https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim) a good and sensible default that's not too opinionated.
  • My Flow and Productivity has Improved with the Simplicity of Neovim
    14 projects | dev.to | 21 Jun 2024
    With all of the above as the foundation for my move, where did I start? Honestly, not quite at the bottom but pretty close to it with TJ DeVries' KickStart project. I went down the path of wanting to understand exactly how my setup is working and only add in the plugins that I wanted. Looking back, I just didn't have the time to fully understand exactly what this meant. However, the act of failing with KickStart did give me some solid background in how Neovim, Lua, and Lazy (the plugin manager) work.
  • My Text Editor Journey: Towards Modal Editing
    5 projects | dev.to | 21 May 2024
    And I did give it some time when I tried it again after a while. I would say, using kickstart.nvim was one of the best choices I've ever taken. Hat's off to TJ for creating this wonderful piece of neovim config. It slowly eased me into the world of modal editing and, thereby, into neovim.
  • Now I get NeoVim
    1 project | dev.to | 16 May 2024
    I started by looking at The Primeagen Neovim tutorial that is only 4 videos long, used vim motions in VS Code for about a week, and then I made the jump to the real deal, I downloaded the kickstart.nvim files and starting using it. It was painful, I could not get some basic features for my personal projects working, highlight was broken as well as the go-to definitions, but as you should do as a developer, I looked up in google how to solve some issues, I found that I was missing some dependencies and I needed to install some stuff so treesitter could color my vue files, installed some LSPs, so I could write some basic Golang and I became to be productive.

LazyVim

Posts with mentions or reviews of LazyVim. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-21.
  • Neovim freezes when I type /
    1 project | /r/neovim | 6 Dec 2023
    Please take a look at this issue. The culprit is the path source of nvim-cmp.
  • File structure with lazy
    2 projects | /r/neovim | 21 Nov 2023
    I’m having trouble understanding the preffered file structure when using lazy. I have a setup that works currently and I used this guide but I believe that this configuration defeats the purpose of lazy-loading. I also tried moving all of the plugin configs to the /nvim/plugins folder but that didn’t work, I think because when using lazy you want lazy to handle the loading not RTP. I’ve taken a look at the lazyvim github but I’m a little bit overwhelmed. I don’t understand how their nvim/init.lua doesn’t point to anything with require. Here is my config. So I think that the mistake I’m making is loading all my plugins in a table that gets passed to lazyvim but then requiring configs from my init.lua, when all of that info should get passed directly to lazy vim via multiple lua tables?
  • Lazyflex.nvim: Makes it easier to test and troubleshoot a neovim configuration.
    4 projects | /r/neovim | 20 Oct 2023
    Has presets for each default plugin module in LazyVim.
  • How does something like LazyVim or LazyNvim write the startup text?
    4 projects | /r/neovim | 3 Oct 2023
    I have been looking at LazyNvim and LazyVim and I would like to do something similar to in particular LazyNvim's startup text. How do configurations like this create this startup text?
  • Weird search behavior
    1 project | /r/neovim | 24 Sep 2023
    See this Lazyvim issue.
  • lazy loading alpha.nvim
    1 project | /r/neovim | 29 Aug 2023
    You can try to mimic how LazyVim loads alpha here https://github.com/LazyVim/LazyVim/blob/main/lua/lazyvim/plugins/ui.lua
  • Help me understand this rtp LazyVim trick
    1 project | /r/neovim | 30 Jul 2023
    As usual, I referred to how folke does stuff for inspiration, and I want to better understand what exactly is going with the Treesitter configuration in LazyVim.
  • I love this bastard
    5 projects | /r/neovim | 5 Jul 2023
    LazyVim (This is a distro in the form of a plugin, imo beats astronvimm nvchad, lunarvim for that reason alone. Check out the plugins/extras/lang directory in there. Has setup for a few languages. You can see the list here. Just raise a request for JAVA and someone will have your back))
  • neovim config
    2 projects | /r/neovim | 4 Jul 2023
    Anyways, although i have not used them, LazyVim and LunarVim comes highly recommended. You can try these and see what suits you .
  • Just started using LazyVim and this could be a really dumb question.
    1 project | /r/neovim | 3 Jul 2023
    Am I reading this correctly, in the LazyVim starter, this line reads as it's importing all the plugins from the remote GitHub project, is that correct?

What are some alternatives?

When comparing kickstart.nvim and LazyVim you can also consider the following projects:

NvChad - Blazing fast Neovim framework providing solid defaults and a beautiful UI, enhancing your neovim experience.

lazy.nvim - 💤 A modern plugin manager for Neovim

AstroNvim - AstroNvim is an aesthetic and feature-rich neovim config that is extensible and easy to use with a great set of plugins

Neovim-from-scratch - 📚 A Neovim config designed from scratch to be understandable

LunarVim - 🌙 LunarVim is an IDE layer for Neovim. Completely free and community driven.

KotlinLanguageServer - Kotlin code completion, diagnostics and more for any editor/IDE using the Language Server Protocol

coc.nvim - Nodejs extension host for vim & neovim, load extensions like VSCode and host language servers.

SpaceVim - A community-driven modular vim/neovim distribution - The ultimate vimrc

emmet-ls - Emmet support based on LSP.

CodeRabbit: AI Code Reviews for Developers
Revolutionize your code reviews with AI. CodeRabbit offers PR summaries, code walkthroughs, 1-click suggestions, and AST-based analysis. Boost productivity and code quality across all major languages with each PR.
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Nutrient – The #1 PDF SDK Library, trusted by 10K+ developers
Other PDF SDKs promise a lot - then break. Laggy scrolling, poor mobile UX, tons of bugs, and lack of support cost you endless frustrations. Nutrient’s SDK handles billion-page workloads - so you don’t have to debug PDFs. Used by ~1 billion end users in more than 150 different countries.
www.nutrient.io
featured