At the end of 2023 I got antsy. I was finally going to do it...again. I was about to venture on leaving LazyVim and create my own Neovim config from scratch using lazy.nvim with inspiration and knowledge that I gathered from LazyVim (the greatest Neovim distro to date).
My first exposure to vi/vim was after I installed Linux and needed to edit files in the terminal, much like how other people probably find it. I don't exactly remember if Ubuntu (my first distro) had Nano enabled as the default editor back then, so I think I may have been forced to learn how to edit using vi.
I slowly became comfortable editing files using Vim and even doing a little C programming with it, but barely scratching the surface of the editor's power.
Once I got into Linux ricing, I saw that people had really cool looking Vim configurations. I wanted to make mine look like that too, but I wasn't really interested in using the editor for more than editing system files quickly.
Some time went by and I was finally sick of GUI editors being memory hogs and slow. I went down the road of trying to configure Vim as a full-fledged IDE using CoC and other great plugins from Tpope. I used that for a bit, but couldn't really dive into using it permanently at work. It was still fun to mess with in my free time.
One day I heard about Neovim and how it was supposedly blazingly fast with LuaJIT and a faster development cycle. I installed and went down the road of migrating over to a Lua-based config. It was early in the plugin days, so things were really rough unless you had your ear to the ground and were already a Vim/Lua wiz. I was not, so I got a bit overwhelmed.
This is about the time that I found out about Neovim distributions. It was a relief from the anxiety of having to maintain my own configuration...or at least I thought. Now instead of having to fix a plugin issue, I had to fix a distro issue, wait for a fix to get pushed upstream, or disable a plugin that they had added. After using my own config again for a bit, I settled on AstroNvim, which was a pleasure to use at my job for a while.
Then lazy.nvim was released - a neovim package manager that was supposed to end the problem of breaking configurations. Shortly after, lazy.nvim's creator and Lua plugin warrior, Folke created LazyVim, a distro that utilizes lazy.nvim. I immediately installed it and replaced AstroNvim. I had been using it full-time up until about a week ago.
I began to get a bit frustrated again with using a distro after I got hit with a few breaking changes, since I cannot resist updating all the plugins whenever I see there are updates available. Things would break at the beginning of a workday and I was too stubborn to rollback, so I neurotically would start fixing editor issues instead of working.
Secretly switched to Doom Emacs for a bit
I came to the realization that I had no idea what was going on with my editor anymore. I already forgot most of the stuff I learned from doing a custom config last time (probably never learned it and copy pasted too much). It was time to buckle down and start over.
I made a list of the things that I truly needed to be productive in my editor:
In my opinion, getting keybindings, LSP and autocompletion working are the main steps to a productive configuration. Basically, I started by reading lazy.nvim's docs and hitting each of the requirements above, reading through the docs of the plugins and sifting through Github discussions and issues when I ran into a problem. Like I said, a lot of my config is taken from LazyVim, because I believe it does the bulk of things in the ideal way. I spent a lot of time reading through the LazyVim source code, then deciding if I needed to extract certain things or could do it myself in a simpler way. I wanted to stay minimalist so that when I read the configuration months down the line I understand what is going on.
After that it is the grind of reading plugin docs and figuring out what you need configured - a daunting task for newcomers and those who don't have the time or patience to read docs.
I will still be following LazyVim's development because it has become somewhat of a source of truth and the community is still active (even though as I write this the project hasn't had a push for two months...)