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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

I also heard about Helix and have been curious about it, for the same reason. If I’m going to learn Vim keybindings, it’s because I want to move fast. Tweaking configuration files for an evening is the exact opposite of moving fast.

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The idea that you constantly need to tweak your config files in vim/neovim is a bizarre myth that seems to have sprung up because vim is so flexible that some people love messing about with config. You can just copy something like vim-sensible to give sensible defaults and get going - you absolutely don't have to do a bunch of tinkering. I have used vim and then neovim for 24 years now and most of my config customization I did more than 15 years ago when I decided to add a bunch of extra keybindings.

I very occasionally will add a plugin or tweak something (eg if I want a new snippet or something) but it's really not necessary to have a big complex config and I would say I spend well under 5 minutes per year on config.

I really wanted to like helix but there are a few really fundamental things that are really crucial to most of my workflows that were just missing (eg reflow text) when I tried it.

Agreed. I've been using (n)vim for roughly 8 years now and only touch my config to put in bits of Lua I've hacked together to make my life slightly easier (~10 minutes every few months? I just do it as-needed). I use 5-6 plugins total. I think the most vocal users are probably responsible for the impression of constant churn, because they've got fancy tricked out configs loaded with alpha-quality plugins and probably do need to constantly update it. Nothing against doing that, but it need not be that way!

Yeah, there definitely seems to be quite a bit of churn for people who adopt the newest plugins, and I think that can lead to the impression that Vim and Neovim require constant configuration maintenance. I don’t think the churn is necessarily bad for people interested in spending a lot of time on their configuration because it means there’s a lot of experimentation, which eventually makes its way to the whole community.

Just use https://astronvim.com/. I haven't touched my config for more than a month. With astronvim community, other people do the hard work.

I also tried the "pure" config from scratch way but its just way too much work to maintain, esp if you want all the goodies. Also, not an expert in Lua so my config sucked. Simply better to use an existing, well-maintained neovim distro. I tried all of them and liked astronvim the best.

Give Helix a try. If you happen not to depend intensely on a few big IDE features it's missing, it's wonderful.

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