I’ve been curating my Vim config for several years and it has blown up to several files and a lot of obscure settings.
My Vim config is my own, a very individual piece of software that fits my preferences when it comes to text editing.
Since NeoVim 0.8, the Vim fork has introduced new groundbreaking features that allow for smarter autocompletion and language server support.
Lua has also become the preferred way of configuring NeoVim, letting VimScript fall out of favor.
I’ve been grudglingly spending some time to partly port my config to lua to take advantage of the new NeoVim features. But I wasn’t happy with my clobbled-together setup anymore.
A friend on Discord suggested LazyVim to me. LazyVim is a fully-fledged config that transforms the barebones NeoVim config into a powerful IDE.
I tried it out a few weeks ago, but it was a little too much magic for me.
If you are looking for a “one-size-fits-all”-solution, look no further. If you are coming from a different editor like VS Code, LazyVim offers a nice experience out of the box.
But for me, it felt as if I had to “learn a new editor” again. There are many plugins and configurations and you have to spend some time figuring out what’s going on.
This weekend I discovered kickstart.nvim which solves (almost) all my problems.
kickstart.nvim is a minimal configuration that sets some defaults, installs the language server and a few other plugins, adds several key mappings. That’s it.
The configuration is much more digestable than the more fully-fledged LazyVim and I felt that I was able to understand easily what was going on.
kickstart.nvim is meant as a starting point and it excells at that. Out of the box you get an agreeable NeoVim experience, but it doesn’t overwhelm you.
Adding your preferred plugins and keybindings is also quite easy.
I’m pretty happy that I stumbled over this GitHub repo. Maybe it’s worth a look, if you’re interested in a minimal but sufficient NeoVim config.