Vim startup should be nearly instantaneous (<<1sec). If it’s not, something is broken. You can do `vim --startuptime profile.log` to find out what’s going wrong.

I'm in the camp where too many plugins (while nice for particular languages) is a crutch. I'd like to still be able to use it when my plugins aren't present on remote machines. It's part of the reason why I had, a one point, used the easy-motion plugin, but dropped it. Does it make things more cumbersome? A tad, but it forced me to build up a better workflow around it.

I'm also wondering when the last time you've used Vim was, because async plugin execution is now a thing, but I switched to NeoVim a while back it's fast.

That has been my experience. Out of the box Vim is fast sure, but when you add plugins for the thousand and one missing functionalities you get OOTB with VSCode etc., it begins to really slow down.

Vim with ~40 plugins loads in about 1 second for me and that's inside of WSL too, which is a heck of a lot slower than native Linux. That's on a 5 year old i5 3.2ghz too.

My vimrc is at: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/blob/master/.vimrc

I'm using NeoVim which might explain the difference, but VSCode is slow to boot and laggy when running on my Ubuntu 18 box. Nvim has never been either.

At work, on OSX, VSCode has been fine though. Still, I've never run into a situation where nvim is slower. And I use a good many plugins (deoplete, ALE, ctrlp, fzf, and 5 sets of language specific plugins).