Vim Distributions

For awhile now I’ve been using neovim as my commandline editor. In the beginning, it worked great for doing quick edits and creating simple scripts when I didn’t want to spend the extra startup time and context-switching on a full GUI editor (although vscodium is very good).

After getting more familiar with the vim way of doing things, I also wanted to turn it into a more IDE-like experience and use it for more complex tasks.

There’s already tons of awesome plugins but managing the installation and setup of them by hand wasn’t something I was interested in, so I looked into neovim configuration distributions.

So I tried out the following:

• LunarVim which seemed to always come up in threads for a good “batteries-included” setup that you can just run the setup command and go with.
• NvChad which had some interesting claims about performance and UI plugins to create a lean and good-looking setup.
• LazyVim with a focus on being easy to extend and customize.
• AstroNvim being extensible and feature-rich.

LunarVim didn’t click with me really, no issue with it particularly I just didn’t connect with it as well as the others I tried to I never went back ot it and attempted to keep using it until I pushed past that feeling.

NvChad was pretty good, but kept pushing breaking changes between releases and I eventually wanted to test out some others and took the opportunity during one such breakage.

LazyVim I like quite a bit, the defaults were good and I felt it was easy to understand and extend the config if I wanted to modify some settings or add a non-default plugin. Also I believe was the first to use the lazy.nvim package manager so felt very snappy and easy to install and upgrade packages.

In the end though, I settled on AstroNvim. In recent releases, it started using lazy.nvim as well bringing all those benefits, had good defaults, and felt like it was a good balance of “batteries-included” but easy to pick and choose and extend as needed.

A killer feature I enjoy about it is the collection of community-contributed package and config groups in the astrocommunity repo. With these, if something isn’t supported by default you can almost always find it in here and with a couple lines of drop-in lua config have some new features.

So for now I’m sticking with Astronvim. I encourage people to give a vim distribution a shot, sometimes it’s too much and people want the simpler vim experience, but for myself I like the almost effortless ability to have a real IDE-like experience right in the terminal that can even compete with the larger, slower GUI applications.

It’s worth noting too that I haven’t tried the other ones in awhile, so there are definitely updates that have been made to them that make it worth a shot to try those out if Astronvim doesn’t stick!