AstroNvim is an aesthetic and feature-rich Neovim config

> The biggest goal of this latest major release was to decrease abstraction from our configuration schema. Rather than implementing our own ways of configuring plugins, we expose it to the user in the same way that they would configure it themselves. That way users don't have to relearn Neovim configuration.

Glad to see this! This is one of the reasons I originally avoided AstroNvim and other pre-built configurations.

Overall though, my experience with neovim has been bad. I've tried hand-built configurations multiple times but (1) I could never port my vim config just right, some common features would crash, and it was a sour taste having to research how to build an editor out of all the random building blocks (2) LazyVim finally clicked for me but I still get a lot of configuration errors, intermittent crashes, etc. So far I'm still giving neovim a try though I still use vim when I want to avoid all of that mess (e.g. quickly opening / closing files without a lot of float windows).

I just clicked in out of curiosity, and AFAICT the homepage doesn't say anywhere what AstroNvim actually is.

Very cool to see this indeed! I always had an eye on AstroNvim.

I'm currently on a slightly customized NvChad setup and am happy with it. It mainly transitioned me to lua configs, which has been a good decision.

How do you compare with NvChad? It's a slightly different set of tools, yes, but why did you think it needed another 'preconfigured vim' distribution?

This is cool! So basically it's enough to add astrocommunity/pack/go plugin and it will handle all plugins/sitters/syntax/etc needed for the lastest Go nvim experience, right? I've been looking for such an option for a long time.

Nice work, added to https://neovimcraft.com/?search=astro

Feeling a bit bad about putting up a support question here, but here I go (long term vim user and sponsor of the initial nvim fundraiser).

I am using a dark-on-black terminal style, but when I launch astrovim it seems to superimpose a light on dark color scheme. How can I default to a non-invasive colorscheme?

Also check out teej-dv video on kickstart.nvim. I would link but on phone.

Very happy with kickstart though.

I love kickstart. Astro/Lunar, got me started with what's possible with neovim. I easily ported these features to kickstart. The benefit is an maintainable vim config and better understanding of lua to extend according to my preferences.

You're really doing a good job of selling astroVim. I've been using lunarvim for a year and it's been decent but I'm going to give astroVim a try now.

Are there any other vim toolkits that take the astroVim 3.0 approach?

Why does packer somehow suck even more than what came before it? If I put my config on a new computer as you mentioned you need to "kick" it as in running :PackerInstall like ten times... Thanks for letting me know something that sucks less exists

I just used https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim. I did have my own config but I had it across multiple files and this one is simpler.

Astro is more of an attempt to replicate the full IDE experience. You can just copy-paste the above, and you are going (personally, I don't think nvim should be used like a full IDE, you really don't need the file tree or tabs, nvim has a better system than this).

If you are new to vim/nvim in general give https://www.lunarvim.org/ a try. Most things should just work / are easy to set up.

If you already have some experience and want to configure your own this is a great scaffold to build your own thing: https://github.com/LunarVim/nvim-basic-ide

I found it much easier to install a list of twenty plugins myself.

The problem I had with these projects is that in order to use them, you first have to read the plugin documentation before understanding how to use it.

I used these projects to check what plugins they were using, and then I would go to the plugin Github and check what is does. Then if I like it, I would copy it inside.

Don't use any of them.

Use Neovim just as if it were VIM. I've been doing that since I've started using Neovim, the only thing that I missed were encrypted files.

The best way to deal with such situations in my opinion is flipping a coin and letting everything up to chance. Given the [minimal] stakes, the cost of analysis / paralysis is far greater than any regret from an imperfect config.

It gets brought up a lot in vim discussions. It's missing a few major things for me;

1. Tabs (like in vim). I've found only vim and emacs have tabs in a way that makes sense to me. Kakoune also has a cool model, where I can use my window manager (or tmux) to recreate tabs.

2. Code folding, I like to fold everything as soon as I open a file to get an "overview" and then slowly unfold as look into the details. Wasn't in Helix last time I checked.

3. Narrowing. Emacs has it built in [0], (neo)vim requires a plugin [1]. Similar to code folding, when I'm working on a large function, I want to pretend it's the entirety of my buffer.

Other than that, I'm not convinced that changing the order of key combinations makes sense. Kakoune did the same, I'm not a fan. I spent too long "thinking" in vim mode.

I think it's great at bringing the "floor" up, it's much easier to get productive in helix. But the ceiling is lower than vim.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Na...

[1] https://github.com/hoschi/yode-nvim

Just my graybeard opinions:

- Love the possibility to download a single-file static executable that works out of the box, without need for a bizarre install method

- Love that basic vim keybindings work

- Hate that it does not come with a manpage hx.1

- Mildly annoyed by the default look and feel (line numbers taking horizontal space so that my code does not fit on the 80 column terminal, ugly white bar at the bottom, ugly negative-contrast completion hints, lines longer than 70 columns silently disappear to the right of the screen forcing me to do very unergonomical horizontal scroll, tabs should be 8 spaces by default not 2)

- There's really nothing wrong with this program, but it just feels like a vim clone, and I don't see the point to move from vim in my case.

I think it's great. I picked it up on a whim, and it then managed to turn into my default (code) editor. The good: -Closeness to Vim and the floating option menu (if you eg. press g, it shows you what options you have in the lower right of the screen) make it really easy to learn and be productive with -Some amazing defaults. m (for select inner word, delimiter, function, class, etc.) is great, the multi-cursor mode is absolutely amazing and wipes the floor with Vim's "search and replace" functionality for all sorts of reasons. -Multi-cursor mode and the s-key (take a selection, filter by regex) is absolutely amazing in general. Makes it incredibly easy to perform repetitive edits. -All sorts of stuff just works -Built in treesitter for movements and highlighting, and built-in LSP support which works great -Helix makes NeoVim look old and crufty. When loading NeoVim it was common to run into annoyances with plugins, where it felt like various plugins or functionalities are "fighting" each other over control. Helix feels very slick and modern in comparison, -you don't need 90% of the classic vim plugins most people use, since they're already built into the program

The bad: -Still lacks certain features, apparently softwrapping lines at screen-width is currently being worked on, and that's a feature I've been waiting for -Can't do some of the fancy stuff you can do with vim plugins, eg. LaTeX support with PDF-viewer connection, or Jupyter notebooks, or whatever sort of highly specific thing you might want to do -Not as good at editing plaintext as Vim. Vim has eg. das ~ "delete as sentence", Helix doesn't. Couple that with lack of softwrapping (for now), and it's a pain

It's pretty great, and I see no reason not to use it. I run into situations where Helix isn't suitable (eg. LaTeX or plaintext), and then I just switch to regular NeoVim. The keybinds are close enough that it's easy to switch back and forth

It looks nice and fresh but I don't understand how to quickly add support for a language. hx --health show red crosses everywhere, LSP column has red crosses with elm-lang, elvish, etc. or None.

Documentation about adding languages seems more about adding new languages.

What should I do to get niceties ?

edit: ah, thanks search engine then arch wiki then https://docs.helix-editor.com/languages.html then https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/How-to-install-th...

I'm using it to edit rust code, and it's great that it works out of the box. I was looking for something feature comparable to vs-code, and struggled with emacs and neovim plugins. It is changing, but I've been happy with it for the last 6 months.

I want to like helix and have tried to daily-drive it

it just seems missing so much still

a quick example - in emacs, I can do "comment-region" and I will get to comment out a selection with the right comment sequence - afaik even something as simple as that doesn't work in helix

so many other things

minor modes are important...in emacs I can have spell checking as a "minor mode" when editing markdown...how do I do this in helix?

easy support for lsp is fine but that means helix is useless if you don't have lsp for a file format you are working on...like .txt! emacs is still a great TEXT editor

maybe one day helix will be an option, not today

I use it daily and i love the way it works more like kankoune.

But it definitely misses support for multiple lsp's per file and plugins.

Otherwise it just works.

With `hx --health` you can see what executable you need to have a specific LSP working and most of the languages are really zero conf.

I'm also using the master branch version, as the last release is some time ago, but it still works even though it is not a "stable releae".

I can't use it because it does not support multi LSP for one file.

For example if you have typescript and eslint.

Helix right now can't run both.

So you would need to run eslint in the terminal.

Always wanted to try it but the biggest barrier to me is that if I were to pick this up, it would not be available on all machines where as vi is.

You can't use this with Vim anyway, it's for Neovim.

Edit: why the downvotes? This is a Lua based neovim setup that can't be used with vim.

You can turn autoscan (fetch from git repos) off, update should normally be opt-in already. You can use a lockfile and only update on demand. That's a more sane option. But yes, auditing 50+ git repos is not something I've attempted.

Random node packages processes truly sounds horrible for both security and performance, but you do want at least one LSP process spawned per filetype, right?

As someone who tried to use Spacevim for a year+ I will say that a) it makes it more stable in a way, instead of your own hyper-custom config that could still break on updating vim/plugins you have a hundred plus other people having the same issues to debug it + a big community finding best of class Vim plugins doing the work of iterating it for you, but b) it's a bit rigid and even with the ability to tweak them you're better off either fully committing or not doing it at all because you'll be caught in between their complex config and your own breaking changes which is the worse of both worlds (as a starting config it's still very useful though).

This is ideal for people who can't be bothered to invest the time in a very personalized set up (like Linux desktop VS MacOS) but still want something more powerful and widely accessible than VSCode for most languages (the big exception being VSCode for Typescript/JS, as a Vim obsessed dev I've finally conceded to Code, since that's my day job).

In my experience of using LunarVim (which is also a preconfigured neovim). It is incredibly unstable. Plugins often don't work well with each other. Keybindings overlap. You do it with the hope of having fewer things to configure but what ends up happening is you create more config to disable slow default plugins, or add workarounds to existing ones. Updating neovim or lunarvim always breaks my config. These things aren't the least bit backward compatible.

I'm slowly switching to helix, and this time around will be forcing myself to use the defaults, and not adding a single line of config.

Vim is a tool for editing text, and plugins exist to make manipulating text easier or make it easier to write code. I use vim over other editors because of its editing paradigms. I extend vim because I want to make my life easier. Emulation of vim in other editors is often fine to excellent, but it does make the ergonomics of using and extending the editor a little bit more complicated. Most Emacs modes need to have extensions specifically written for Evil so that things don't step on each others toes, vim's plugins are all written with that already in mind. It then becomes a matter of plugins not fighting with each other for keybindings, though that isn't really that much of an issue for me.

Given this is how I use vim, it doesn't detract from the purpose of vim for me. I'm not entirely sure what you think the point of vim is? Do you use it as your primary editor and just choose to eschew plugins for the sake of stability or do you only use it for quick edits?

From my personal experience, most of the issues I encountered happened with new neovim releases and not with plugin interopability.

My config never broken because of a plugin.

The purpose of Vim for me isn't to be stable, it's to help me edit text in a very efficient manner. Lots of great plugins improve this for me.

That depends on the plugins selection I guess. When I tried SpaceVim its start-up time was higher than VSCode so I uninstalled it..

I use vim daily and have been for years. I find those initiatives really interesting and especially I see things like org mode for vim which, although it is only a subset of org mode for emacs, could help me with some usecases.

However I also find those things overwhelming. Just looking at the readme I feel like I'll need a few nights of learning and weeks of practice to figure out a workflow, plus it won't be available soon on my few computers and ever on my many servers. What I like in vim is also it's ubiquity and simplicity. I know my vim config by heart (it's just 6 lines) and just type it in when I login and I don't like the installed config.

How would you or anyone recommend approaching a transition to those kind of framework or frontends or whatever it's called ?

If you haven't tried out AstroNvim v3.0 yet over the past couple years when you were playing around with AstroNvim I would definitely recommend trying it out. The new v3.0 release made a lot of improvements to the configuration structure to decrease abstraction and make things easier. Although, if you have a setup that you like with NvChad that's definitely a good approach as well. All comes down to personal preference.

What did you find missing with nvchad and astroVim? The reason I ask is that I switched from intellij to lunarvim (similar to nvchad) about a year ago, and I felt like it only took me a couple hours to add a few extra keybinds and plugins like trouble.nvim and copilot.lua to make my IDE experience match intellij

I’d be interested in this too.

Seems a bit daunting to move from an existing neovim setup. Lazy.nvim does look good so it’s a little tempting. Any hints to smooth the way?

You can specify which config to use while launching NeoVim with the -u flag.

The $NVIM_APPNAME in neovim 0.9 can do this.

I tried to get LSPs properly set up in Vim but I think with the help of the these "distributions" in neovim, I finally found something where neovim works much better than Vim. For me, neovim is finally showing its net positive value.

Unlike Javascript, this isn't a whole new framework that you have to learn all over again. This is just a set of configurations that change the look and feel of NeoVim - which doesn't take re-learning if you're used to Vi/Vim. The whole point of this is that you can install NeoVim as your editor, install this config, and get started without having to customize things yourself. Most people will tweak it as they go in order to fit personal preferences, but this provides a good starting point.

It's a _lot_ saner than the JS ecosystem in my opinion.

I love the fact that we can now start to make this joke about vim.

AstroNvim is using aerial.nvim which is a great code outline plugin. It has several supported backends on top of LSP and Treesitter it also supports Man page structure and Markdown structure explicitly. We also use the API for building the breadcrumbs at the top of each window as well!

https://github.com/stevearc/aerial.nvim

Keep downvoting, you guys, I think it's working now!