Comment by wrapperup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wrapperup | Hacker News Reader

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I've used all except Kakoune. For me, Neovim is the one that stuck. Helix is cool, but having no plugins is a deal breaker (for now!) The onboarding experience is much nicer for sure, and Helix's LSP is way easier to set up than Neovim's.

That being said, Neovim, once you get it set up, is great. The biggest hurdle for me was the config, but if you just start from scratch and make a light config (mines about 200-300 lines, with LSP, hints, etc) you can get through it. And you never have to touch it again, since most likely you configured it in a way you like. Well unless you wanna add the occasional plugin. There are also distros of Neovim that contain a fully baked IDE-lite experience, but honestly those have extremely complicated config, and often IME don't feel nice and light.

It's definitely not for everyone. There is that time investment to get started, but it's definitely been worth it for me.

My config: https://github.com/wrapperup/nvim-config

> And you never have to touch it again, since most likely you configured it in a way you like.

That was the issue for me, there actually is quite a bit of churn in the Neovim plugins ecosystem compared to VSCode (Packer vs Lazy for plugin management is just the latest iteration). I used to have Neovim plugins all built out but the churn was too much for me.

Oh yeah for sure. I haven't had that happen to me, but when I dropped AstroNvim, I had a chance to start from fresh (on lazy).

Small customized config also means smaller and more precise changes. I haven't touched mine in quite a long time, only usually to add that cool trick or plugin that pops up every so often.

I think it's what you do with it.

I've used vim-plug for over a decade and it's been working fine. Yes there has been a lot of churn within some plugins, but overall it hasn't been that bad in my opinion.

And with lazy tracking plugin versions in a lock file, it's easy enough to pin plugins to a known good version whenever something breaks.

(I finally rewrote my entire config, and lazy is vastly better than vim-plug. I should've done so sooner.)

> (I finally rewrote my entire config, and lazy is vastly better than vim-plug. I should've done so sooner.)

What's better about it? I ask because I've been using `Plug` since I switched from pathogen (what feels like) an eternity ago and I don't really know any reason to switch because it just sort of works...? Every few years or whatever I'll overhaul the config (not a choice but it just sort of happens) and I'm curious whether switching plugin management plugin has a point.

Some things:

- You can specify plugins dependencies, instead of having everything in a big list.

- You can separate each plugin setup/configuration into separate files.

- It tracks plugin versions in a lock file that you can commit into git. Makes it easy to identify plugins that breaks and lets you pin it to a known good version.

- Nicer UI to install and update plugins, including a git log for each plugin.

- Lazy loading of plugins. Not critical, but it does make a difference if you have a few slow plugins that you need occasionally or just a lot of plugins.

- Profile plugin startup times in a nice way.

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