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Comment by rmunn | Hacker News Reader

I never edited the default config much.

But then I discovered https://www.lazyvim.org/. Turns your copy of NeoVim into an IDE.

I still haven't edited the default config much, actually. But now I'm probably 2x to 3x as productive in vim (nvim, now) as before.

P.S. If you decide to check out the LazyVim config, I highly recommend reading https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ all the way through. There's a lot of new keybindings to learn, but Dusty Phillips's book gives you a gentle on-ramp to learning most of them.

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I should mention what is becoming my favorite thing about LazyVim's default config, which is the "flash" or "seek" command (LazyVim maps it to `s` so I think of it as "seek") from https://github.com/folke/flash.nvim. I didn't like it at first as I was used to typing `s` to quickly replace a single character with a bunch of text (as opposed to `r` which replaces it with just one character). But I soon learned to remap my brain to use `cl` where I used to use `s`, and then I learned to love "flash"/"seek" mode.

I wrote about how it works in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48118585 so I won't repeat that here. But if I had to pick my favorite feature from LazyVim's config... well, actually it would probably be something else, but `s` is definitely in the top three by now.

Flash is amazing, and what made me drop VSCode. Flash feels like an innovation and basically lets me move my cursor at almost the speed of thought. Highly recommend people try it out and play with it!

BTW: The Vimium extension [1] for Firefox has a similar mode for links called "linkHinting" which I've mapped to s[2] for a similar experience in the browser :)

[1]: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

[2]: `map s LinkHints.activateMode`

I similarly thank the stars I ran into AstroNVim, which itself is based on LazyVim. Out of the box it has a lot of well integrated/just works pieces. It has a bunch of leader key things setup, and, crucially, a little visual navigator at the bottom of the screen. Going from powerful but invisible to having something I could see was such a help! I'd compare it to moving from tmux to zellij but I'm a pretty happy tmux user. https://astronvim.com/

What really seals the AstroNVim deal for me though is the community packs. People have very thoughtfully integrated support for a huge range of nvim plugins. And it's super easy to install, and they often fit in nicely to the existing out of box experience of nvim. https://github.com/AstroNvim/astrocommunity

Yeah, I have also been really impressed with AstroNVim. I tried using LazyVim for quite some time but I kept having a hard time getting used to it. Somehow I kept tripping up when trying to do things.

On one of my servers I needed to disable icons which AstroNVim handles very conveniently (https://docs.astronvim.com/recipes/icons/#disable-icons). After switching I noticed that using AstroNVim feels so much more natural to me. It's been a joy to use.

I think it might be because the defaults are less bespoke and it's just a bit leaner. The community packs have also been great for customization.

Hey, AstroNvim core maintainer here! Just wanted to clear something up. AstroNvim is in no way based on LazyVim, AstroNvim existed for almost 2 years before LazyVim existed...

Apologies & thanks. AstroNvim used lazy.nvim, which is a (ragingly popular) plugin loader, not LazyVim, a setup for nvim also based on lazy.nvim.

Ref on lazy.vim: https://docs.astronvim.com/configuration/customizing_plugins...

The demos of LazyVim looks really nice, and people seem to get a benefit/joy out of it. I gave it a try, but it's a little to much for me.

Right now I think my .vimrc is two lines. That's also sort of silly as I benefit very little from all the things Vim can do.

I am with you on that one. I use Emacs and the Vi family. If I wanted IDE features in my text editor, then I would probably be better served using an IDE. Less to manage is less to burden.

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