I miss Vim

Yep this reads like someone who tricked out their car, blows out the clutch because it has too much horsepower, then starts pining for the days when they didn’t need a double clutch. You never needed a double clutch!

As an aside I’m surprised that people struggle with vendor management and config management for neovim. Like are people picking unstable packages, or is their config wired up in a super brittle way? If you’re gonna invest in your own tooling, surely it’s your job to set it up to be stable over $TIMEFRAME ? Speaking as someone who’s used pretty much the same Neovim config for a few years with maybe half a day messing with it since setting it up

I understand your and OP's situation and I got overwhelmed by all the fancy plugins myself. But then I realized: Hey, I can just use neovim like vanilla vim and don't have to get the next best plugin when it comes out.

I think it happened when I tried out Mason, too. And it didn't feel like an improvement. So I scrapped my config and started a new one. With Lazy (because that's actually nice), Telescope and a few LSPs I need/want. That's mostly it. You don't have to get much fancier than that. (obviously including some basic vim settings and keymaps, but that's just like in vanilla vim, but in lua)

Couldn't you just have used your old vimrc with Neovim?

This is what Helix did right - putting essentials into the core. I'm still not sold on their editing model, even as someone new to modal editing and not encumbered by existing habits. The improvement is not that dramatic to justify abandoning the vim keymaps which you have in every editor. Also, it is missing features like debugger or git integration, so I will stick with Neovim for now. I do like, though, that they are choosing Scheme for extension language. That alone may convince me to switch in the future.

I agree. Helix has been the first TUI editor that I have been able to be productive on. With Emacs, vim and neovim, there was so much fiddling just to get started. And the more functionality I added, the slower and bigger the editors became, so I kept going back to the JetBrains suite and vscode.

With Helix, it was love at first sight. I like how discoverable its UI is. I prefer the modal approach of Helix where movement goes first, so that I can see over what what and where my action will take place. I like not having to fiddle with plugins. I like the defaults, meaning my config file fits on my screen and there's still vertical space to spare.

I did the same and don't regret it. My Helix config is 4 lines and it does 95% of what I want. The performance of a ton of neovim plugins is also atrocious and I always hated that everything was a hodgepodge mix of C, vimscript and Lua.

Félix Is like MacOS, it's good until it's not and then you can't extend it.

Spot on, this just sounds like complaining for the sake of complaining. Use vim if that's your preference. I used vim for over a decade, and switching to nvim was a breath of fresh air.

neovim does not support running external programs that have an UI with `!`

So, no.

I've been enjoying my time with Helix, although I've had to undo some muscle memory associated with vim, and add back commands I missed too much (never letting you go, 'dd').

My major complaint with Helix, and one that will stop me from using it long term, is the (IMO) insane undo behaviour. It always undoes too much and then I get myself into a mess. There's something about undo checkpoints and being able to manually create one, but I don't feel managing that should be my problem.

Well, you either have "pre-assembled" hamburger, or freedom to cook your own. Imagine going to McDonalds and asking them to let you into their kitchen to customize your burger from scratch, choose specific ingredients, adjust cooking temperatures, and rearrange their workflow to match your preferences.

Asking Emacs to be "batteries included" misses its fundamental nature - it's not a fast-food IDE, it's your own personal kitchen for crafting exactly the development environment you want.

Even starter kits - Doom, Prelude, Spacemacs, etc. - are not really "ready-made" products; they're more like recipe books, where you have the freedom to choose and pick from, but they still don't liberate you from having to learn how to "cook things." They don't "magically" solve things for you.

That's the unix philosophy of using one tool for one thing, that does it well. The advantage is that it really opens a marketplace which means you are not tied to one solution if that solution turns out to suck. An alternative will quickly pop up, you switch, everybody does that, and in no time the bad piece has been worked around and replaced. This works against the "batteries included" philosophy but avoids being stuck for a long time with sub-par components.

Over time, when things stabilize, that approach can change. But nvim is still very much a moving target.

Python tries a middle ground. An http server is included, sime crypto libs are as well, but if you need something specialized you can still install alternative modules. That model seems to work well.

> I wish something was there that is more "batteries included" than them.

There are e.g. Spacemacs and Doom emacs that don't only include batteries, but supercritical nuclear reactors about to explode at any moment. :)