If anyone’s curious/interested in it… while the stock editor is pretty “basic” (it can still do a ton of stuff!), the plugin ecosystem (or whatever it’s called) is really nice. You can use “pre-built” ones like LunarVim, LazyVim, or NvChad (I’ve used this one, it aims to be highly customisable and it’s pretty nice). There are probably many others.
You might want to get used to the key binds and such before doing any of that though ahahah. Once you open it, if you type :Tutor and press enter it should bring you to a little tutor program for explaining the basics.
I do however highly encourage you to try making your own config! You could write it in vimscript, but Neovim has full support for Lua. You can even have multiple different init files for it. (You can select them with the -u flag when running nvim. Like: nvim -u path/to/my/config_file.lua ). I liked ThePrimeagen’s video about making a config from scratch (personally I really like his energy and personality, but he does sometimes yell and stuff (i don’t think there’s much of this in this video) so it might not appeal to everyone). I haven’t really looked at any other resources (besides the built-in :help lua-guide and random searches), but I’m sure there’s a ton out there.
I can’t really comment on the preconfigured packages; I learned way back in the 90s before things like that existed. Definitely recommend learning the editor before going crazy with customization, though, and the tutor is also where I started. There is an enormity of config options, as you’d expect for software that has almost 50 years of history, so just start with what you want / fixing what annoys you.
It’s nice to have everything ready for you in Lunar, Lazy, Chad Vim, but it is honestly too much for any newbie to take at once.
For anyone starting with vim/neovim best advice is to start with vanilla experience: no configs, no plugins and just learn basics.
Then search for fixes to major annoyances, and when you’re comfortable with keybindings look for plugins to extend features. You’ll quickly realize how small is number of customizations required to be fast and productive in [Neo]Vim.
+1 for Neovim I love that thing.
If anyone’s curious/interested in it… while the stock editor is pretty “basic” (it can still do a ton of stuff!), the plugin ecosystem (or whatever it’s called) is really nice. You can use “pre-built” ones like LunarVim, LazyVim, or NvChad (I’ve used this one, it aims to be highly customisable and it’s pretty nice). There are probably many others.
You might want to get used to the key binds and such before doing any of that though ahahah. Once you open it, if you type
:Tutor
and press enter it should bring you to a little tutor program for explaining the basics.I do however highly encourage you to try making your own config! You could write it in vimscript, but Neovim has full support for Lua. You can even have multiple different init files for it. (You can select them with the
-u
flag when runningnvim
. Like:nvim -u path/to/my/config_file.lua
). I liked ThePrimeagen’s video about making a config from scratch (personally I really like his energy and personality, but he does sometimes yell and stuff (i don’t think there’s much of this in this video) so it might not appeal to everyone). I haven’t really looked at any other resources (besides the built-in:help lua-guide
and random searches), but I’m sure there’s a ton out there.It’s really fun :DD
I can’t really comment on the preconfigured packages; I learned way back in the 90s before things like that existed. Definitely recommend learning the editor before going crazy with customization, though, and the tutor is also where I started. There is an enormity of config options, as you’d expect for software that has almost 50 years of history, so just start with what you want / fixing what annoys you.
It’s nice to have everything ready for you in Lunar, Lazy, Chad Vim, but it is honestly too much for any newbie to take at once. For anyone starting with vim/neovim best advice is to start with vanilla experience: no configs, no plugins and just learn basics. Then search for fixes to major annoyances, and when you’re comfortable with keybindings look for plugins to extend features. You’ll quickly realize how small is number of customizations required to be fast and productive in [Neo]Vim.