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I’ve been using vi through Neovim since the early 90’s, and I’ve tried the distros; a few anyway: Astro, Lunar, Lazy, Chad. But I always comeback to a bespoke config and am left wondering why people use distros.
They’re good for getting some ideas about what you might be missing, but one’s own config is pretty easy these days. It wasn’t in the vimscript and early packager complexity, but now it is easy.
And with the new vim.pack, even using package managers seems like unnecessary complexity for a little gain in api utility.
For someone who just wants a sane editor, I don’t need not care for seeing up my own config or keeping up to date with neovim plugins. Like you mention vim.pack, but why should I add a user need to keep up with which plugins has the latest congenital features?
The advantage of a distro is that somebody else sets up sane defaults, keeps plugins up to date and uses the latest cool plugins. All without me needing to spend any time reading documentation and trying to set up a new plugin. And it still allows me full customization, where it’s easy to add or disable plugins.
Essentially all a distro does is move the starting point from a very basic text editor to a fairly advanced text editor. So to me it feels like a no brainier to use as my base, because somebody with 10x my experience with vim will be better at designing a work flow with vim than I will.
Not necessarily untrue, but you end up both with baggage you don’t need and worse yet, not understanding how you got what you do have.
Neovim all by itself is a very capable editor with no plugins at all. The reason you should know plugins is irrelevant, in my view. You should not need to know any, unless you want to do. And then the reason is just because you want it.
To each of their own needs of course. I don’t begrudge anybody their use of distros; I just don’t see them as optimal.
Neovim still feels pretty obscure to new users, which is a shame considering how powerful it is. That’s part of why distros got so popular, and also because we’ve gotten used to plug-and-play setups.
The downside is that, while they’re efficient and usually good enough, they don’t really teach you how Neovim works. So when something breaks or you want to do something specific, you can get stuck. The community also has tons of great plugins, and even if some look similar, they’re built for different needs. With distros, you might not get the one that fits you best.
Setting up Neovim from scratch takes effort, but in the end, you get something perfectly tailored to your needs. Nonetheless if you can be guided by an experienced user, you can get on track within only two hours. That said, a lot of people are fine with basic features and just adapt to their tools. Personally, I like that Linux adapts to me instead.
