this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Neovim

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Neovim is a modal text editor forked off of Vim in 2014. Being modal means that you do not simply type text on screen, but the behavior and functionality of the editor changes entirely depending on the mode.

The most common and most used mode, the "normal mode" for Neovim is to essentially turn your keyboard in to hotkeys with which you can navigate and manipulate text. Several modes exist, but two other most common ones are "insert mode" where you type in text directly as if it was a traditional text editor, and "visual mode" where you select text.

Neovim seeks to enable further community participation in its development and to make drastic changes without turning it in to something that is "not Vim". Neovim also seeks to enable embedding the editor within GUI applications.

The Neovim logo by Jason Long is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

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Just wondering: how would you characterize the general feel of the different nvim flavours: LazyVim, Chad, Astro, etc.? I'm not thinking functionality, which plugins are included, etc., but the way they feel when one uses them.

I tried out a whole bunch of them, as per Elijah Manor's excellent video about config switching (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkHjJlSgKZY)

I figured out LazyVim is trying its best not to look and feel like vim, with modal windows and fancy graphics and all. I didn't like that. I can't remember why I left Astro behind, but I finally settled on Chad, which at first I disliked because of the name, but eventually I figured out that that was the flavour for me: so many things just worked as expected, and there were so many times when I looked up something, and went: "Hm! That was quite smart, actually!"

So that's where I'm at โ€“ and purely for "feel" reasons. So: convince me: what am I missing when I don't use bundle B or config C?

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[โ€“] Cube6392 1 points 2 years ago

I wouldn't worry about bundle FOMO and would instead push my personal belief that bundles are a vim antipattern. When I first started with vim, I started with a bundle called "cream." It made things seem easier for a short while (honestly, maybe a week or so), but eventually there were things I needed help with, functionalities I didn't know, and there was no one to ask for help because I couldn't discern between which things were default vim behavior and which things were cream reconfiguring the editing experience. It is my view that when learning Vim (and you are always learning vim, or at least I am, and so is everyone else around me I've watched open the vim editor at work), you're far better off with a well documented baseline with small modifications to functionality that you made yourself and are familiar and happy with.