I had a easy to maintain, easy to understand vim + ALE + Gutentags + ... setup for C/C++ development and it worked very well but when I got into webdev I just gave up and jump to a neovim distribution as I was not able to catch up. So in the end neovim got me not because it is technically superior but because the community created distributions, which I am very grateful for (R.I.P Lunarvim)
EDIT: Ok, maybe the reason distributions were created is because the integration of some lsp/treesitter stuff enabled it/made it easier ? So if not technically superior, at least more capable
I assume slowly over time Neovim will just win over vim because of this. I do want to say its much more capable than the original vim, I don't know that vim has a headless mode or that it intends on it, but Neovim has that, plus it can essentially let you write plugins in any language with its plugin RPC protocol. So if you want a plugin that targets your language you can leverage existing libraries that directly support your language instead of writing it all from scratch in Vimscript.
Vim does have headless mode, iirc. I used it with eclipse or netbeans, can't exactly remember.
I have Neovim, it still haven't replaced vim yet. But I see the reasoning, IF I want to use a editor to do heavy development, Neovim seems to have more detailed syntax highlighting, and yes LSP integration good.
I use intelliJ with ideaVim for my work, and I don't think these editors can fill the capability that JetBrains offers. Even though vim has a special place in my heart
> I use intelliJ with ideaVim for my work, and I don't think these editors can fill the capability that JetBrains offers. Even though vim has a special place in my heart
I keep wanting them to make a Neovim headless plugin for their IDEs.
I also jumped ship to AstroNvim but I still prefer Lunarvim, I liked having all the config in just one file and some of its defaults. But I agree, Astro is the best distro currently maintained distro in my opinion.
You can definitely put all of your configuration into a single file for AstroNvim if you want.
In the docs it shows the minimal configuration to get AstroNvim running which is <10 lines in your ~/.config/init.lua file and then anything else you can just drop in that same file if you want. (https://github.com/AstroNvim/AstroNvim?tab=readme-ov-file#mi...)
One file worked fine until it didn't. At one point it was 500+ lines and became unwieldy to manage.
Though I might one day switch to Zed or Helix -- I want an editor that has more bells and whistles built-in and that I could just switch them off if I don't want them. Which should be a much smaller configuration footprint compared to what we have today with Neovim.
EDIT: Ok, maybe the reason distributions were created is because the integration of some lsp/treesitter stuff enabled it/made it easier ? So if not technically superior, at least more capable