It takes a while to create your minimal and perfect experience, so if you don’t have the time for that I’d suggest using a ready to go neovim setup. Others have suggests kickstart and lunavim. I’d suggest LazyVim since it uses lazy.nvim which is an async package manager. https://www.lazyvim.org/

I switched to using this a few months ago from Tig. Tig was nice but lazygit is amazing.

I share my dotfiles repo between my MacBook and Linux pc so anything that goes in there is run on both operating systems.

Yes there is definitely a lot that can be learned from those different distributions. The community around them is a big plus. While I don’t use anything magical myself, I’m happy they exist for various reasons.

Yeah I like the set of plugins it comes with. It’s definitely a well curated distributions.

For me LazyVim is just magic I don’t want to learn, along with preferring to have explicit control of the whole setup. Also migrating to something else takes more effort going from one magic to another magic. I’ve just finished migrating from packer to lazy.nvim and I like that I still have all the git history in my plugin/* files.

I’m very happy with my new “vanilla” lazy.nvim setup now.

I’m looking at implementing lazy.nvim, the package manager, but not LazyVim. Personally I like to be in control of everything and LazyVim takes too much away from me.