[mekster]

My NeoVim broke so often I came to realize a product that has 50 random people working on the core and various plugins is not going to make a stable product that would work for years.

After all, there is no consistent testing as a whole product but it's a combination of "works for me" and after some months of originally setting the editor up, things start to break apart saying something is deprecated, something is incompatible with something else and it will start asking for newer NeoVim version which the distro obviously can't keep up with. It's like you're using a nightly build of a product or worse if things can't be fixed.

Maybe someone could snapshot a stable state of NeoVim + some popular plugins and release as some sort of LTS and things might change but currently you'll need to spend time fixing frequently than use it for what you need it for.

[skydhash]

Are you using a neovim distro? I think the broken things only applies for automated setups. I use Vim instead of neovim, but my plugins set is pretty minimal. Most of my config is Vim-related, then a couple of options for the plugins. I instead use the terminal for most stuff.

> Maybe someone could snapshot a stable state of NeoVim + some popular plugins and release as some sort of LTS

Vim Plug (and maybe other plugins managers) can handle tags, branches, and commits references for versioning.

[leoh]

It’s all fucked ime even with nixos from the pov of “just working.” Yes, it’s fun and cool and impressive if you get things all setup and dialed in. But if you care about just dropping in and not spending tons of time configuring your tools, imo JetBrains is just the way to go.

[skydhash]

As a pragmatic programmer, one of the rules is Know thy tools. You don't really drop in. You learn the tools, and adapt them. The first commit of my dotfiles is more than 3 years ago. And I think the actual files are older. And that was me starting from scratch after years of Linux.

Even with JetBrains IDEs, I usually spend an hour configuring stuff (never bothered to save the config, as I seldom use them). I tune my setup as I go. If I'm spending hours everyday with a software, I want it suited to my workflows.

[pquki4]

> Even with JetBrains IDEs, I usually spend an hour configuring stuff

That's you, not most people. Tons of people use VSCode every day for years and their user-level config is not more than a few lines.

You can say what you did helped you personally and you found it worthwhile, but that is no indication of how that would apply to others.

[leoh]

> As a pragmatic programmer, one of the rules is Know thy tools.

Dunno what you’re trying to say with respect to the broader conversation (though I don’t take issue with any of your points, really).

When I say IntelliJ “just works” I hope it’s obvious I’m not just using it as a text editor ;). On the contrary, it is an incredibly powerful tool (I just remembered I forgot to mention shelving — yet another wonderful feature).

Because I’ve spent countless hours with it, I mean it “just works” for doing incredibly sophisticated things that VSCode and nvim hardly approach (let alone with consistency between languages supported by Jetbrains) without an insane amount of time configuring ime.

Yea, you can get good at the configuring, say, with nvim; and it can be fascinating. I am a tools guy. But again, if I want to create X today, futzing with getting the perfect bespoke nvim environment is simply not to my taste.

My point isn’t that my taste is “better”, but more an attempt to say “just use nvim” is not preferable for many folks in many situations.

[skydhash]

I agree with you. I’m not a purist pushing “Unix as a IDE”. I reach to Intellij, Android Studio, and Xcode when the needs arise. I’m saying that a lot of people got confused and try to replicate vs code in neovim, lending to a fragile setup. The correct approach is ground up, maybe taking inspiration from others configs. But everything in your config should be understood.

The same applies to all the tools you use, may it be Intellij, or your shell.

[mekster]

People can spend hours to initially set their environment up but the original post was about having it broken after a period of usage which involves spending unnecessary amount of time fixing than do what they want to do.

[skydhash]

And that's a solved problem. First by not having a fragile setup, then doing backups to have some kind of rollback solutions. An IDE strong point is their cohesion and product support. But it's not magic and things can go haywire. It's like people coding with C or using Arch Linux vs using Java or Debian. The latter are stabler, but they're not silver bullets.