[worldsayshi]

I am now learning vim but I postponed it for the longest time because learning Emacs thought me the opposite lesson. For me learning Emacs, although it was often enjoyable, did not feel worth it in the long run because I kept running into configuration hell. Switching back to an IDE made me realize that I'd rather not waste half my time getting my environment to work.

But I'm giving neovim a chance now. I feel one part excitement for upgrading my developer UX and one part dread of getting stuck in endless rabbit holes.

[christophilus]

Keep your config minimal and learn the built in way of doing things first. If you do that, you don’t end up spending too much time on rabbit trails. I use the default color scheme, telescope, and an autocomplete plugin. That’s about it, and it’s great. My config is a single file.

[karolist]

I think the problem is due to people coming to Vim after they've used an IDE and want an IDE like experience, that's how you end up with Lua module tracelogs when you open nvim and spend time fighting the tools rather than using them. I too went though that phase but in the end I realized that I actually just enjoy vim motions, if I have them in my IDE it's already good. I'm back to Intellij with ideavim plugin and it's been great so far. I know things like lazyvim made the setup more manageable but I've never tried it.

[worldsayshi]

Yeah, I can't really go without the IDE like experience. I now have lazyvim and it seems it gives me IDE features or of the box. The only thing I expect to be a hassle setting up is debugging. But I'll see when I get there.

[robinsonrc]

Helix is definitely worth a look if you’d like to minimise the time you spend configuring things. It’s not as ubiquitous as Vim et al of course but that may not be an issue for you (it certainly isn’t for me)

[pbronez]

I’ve started using VIM because the key bindings are available in many other places. I’m not leaning into advanced configuration, just muscle memory for core actions.