[psytrx]

Very cool to see this indeed! I always had an eye on AstroNvim.

I'm currently on a slightly customized NvChad setup and am happy with it. It mainly transitioned me to lua configs, which has been a good decision.

How do you compare with NvChad? It's a slightly different set of tools, yes, but why did you think it needed another 'preconfigured vim' distribution?

[mehalter]

There are a few key differences here. When AstroNvim was originally created it was very difficult to have complete control over NvChad from the user configuration. When AstroNvim was starting out, our configuration engine was the first thing that we wanted to have really locked down. No matter what opinions we dictated from the core of AstroNvim, every single option should be able to be changed from a user's setup.

Next we really wanted to focus on providing a more stable base. NvChad at the time was not following any sort of version releases and had breaking changes all the time. This lead users to updating their editor and things just randomly breaking. We wanted to set up AstroNvim to follow more rigorous software development practices to help decrease this friction for the user. With our updater you can say that you only want to update within a major version release and then you don't have to worry about fixing breaking changes until you have the time to do so.

Along with this providing a stable base was the battle of managing the distribution of plugins that do not follow any set rules. This led us to our current approach to plugin management in AstroNvim. If you are using the stable release channel of AstroNvim we actually pin all of our core plugins to either a known working git commit or to their current major release version if they follow semantic versioning. This makes sure that updating plugins on the user side won't randomly break core AstroNvim functionality. Naturally this doesn't apply to plugins that the user manages themselves, but at least gets us to as "stable" as we can get it.

The main drive behind all of this is a lot of people use these types of tools to drive their work life. The goal I try to keep in mind is I want to minimize the number of work days people use to their text editor all of a sudden not working for some unknown reason.

Some other key differences:

NvChad also sets up a lot less than AstroNvim under the hood when it comes to language servers/etc. so this does lend to a faster startup time in NvChad than AstroNvim, but better out of the box experience (imo) in AstroNvim for an extremely small start up time cost. So if you want something that truly provides a very good base and do all the other heavy lifting of configuration yourself, NvChad is a really great option!

[mehalter]

Also if you want to see what I mean in my other comment about "out of the box" experience, here is a simple demo video of going from a completely fresh installation of AstroNvim to having language servers, treesitter parsers, and even debugging code without having to even restart the editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04z9v0xMDkw