alt Hacker NewsI never edited the default config much.
But then I discovered https://www.lazyvim.org/. Turns your copy of NeoVim into an IDE.
I still haven't edited the default config much, actually. But now I'm probably 2x to 3x as productive in vim (nvim, now) as before.
P.S. If you decide to check out the LazyVim config, I highly recommend reading https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ all the way through. There's a lot of new keybindings to learn, but Dusty Phillips's book gives you a gentle on-ramp to learning most of them.
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The demos of LazyVim looks really nice, and people seem to get a benefit/joy out of it. I gave it a try, but it's a little to much for me.
Right now I think my .vimrc is two lines. That's also sort of silly as I benefit very little from all the things Vim can do.
I similarly thank the stars I ran into AstroNVim, which itself is based on LazyVim. Out of the box it has a lot of well integrated/just works pieces. It has a bunch of leader key things setup, and, crucially, a little visual navigator at the bottom of the screen. Going from powerful but invisible to having something I could see was such a help! I'd compare it to moving from tmux to zellij but I'm a pretty happy tmux user. https://astronvim.com/
What really seals the AstroNVim deal for me though is the community packs. People have very thoughtfully integrated support for a huge range of nvim plugins. And it's super easy to install, and they often fit in nicely to the existing out of box experience of nvim. https://github.com/AstroNvim/astrocommunity
I should mention what is becoming my favorite thing about LazyVim's default config, which is the "flash" or "seek" command (LazyVim maps it to `s` so I think of it as "seek") from https://github.com/folke/flash.nvim. I didn't like it at first as I was used to typing `s` to quickly replace a single character with a bunch of text (as opposed to `r` which replaces it with just one character). But I soon learned to remap my brain to use `cl` where I used to use `s`, and then I learned to love "flash"/"seek" mode.
I wrote about how it works in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48118585 so I won't repeat that here. But if I had to pick my favorite feature from LazyVim's config... well, actually it would probably be something else, but `s` is definitely in the top three by now.