I chased the mirage, followed the dream, made a mad dash for the pot of NixOS gold at the end of the UNIX rainbow. Now I'm looking over the Jordan into the promised land. There's only one thing left keeping me from crossing over to the other side -- an editor that I can rely on.
See, back in Omakub/Ubuntu land, it's easy. LazyVim is *exactly* what I wanted -- a batteries-included nvim setup that *just works*, that doesn't require weeks of setup to perfect and personalize. Just use the lazy plugin to quickly enable anything you like or turn off things you don't want, and bob's your uncle! you've got yourself a snazzy vi motion editor that can access any file with style (literally and technically), no questions asked.
But NixOS and Lazy seem to be uneasy companions. Nix is a jealous god, manages everything in the OS from a single source of truth. So whither lazyvim? Truth be told, I'm no expert in any of this. In the start of my omakub journey, I thought lazyvim was about the curated mix of plugins and config files and keymappings. I didn't realize that a 'lazy loader' had anything to do with it, since I had no prior experience to compare it with.
Well, now I've found that Lazyvim is the one thing I miss from the Arch/Ubuntu/Manjaro ventures of the past. I don't miss the lazy.nvim plugin per se, but I do wish that I had a way to get that same combo of plugins and configs. Or that I had the know-how to build it myself. I've had some time to percolate on it and I think I've hit on a solution.
A few months back I read a short blog post, and while I can't seem to find it at the moment, I remember the central argument was something like: "vanilla neovim is pretty solid, actually, and you're better off skipping the batteries-included stuff so you can (A) get an appreciation for the capabilities of unvarnished neovim, (B) pick only the plugins/configs/keymaps you actually want, and (C) understand what each plugin/config/keymap does".
Now, I don't have time in my life right now to spend weeks getting aquainted with the nuts and bolts of neovim, but I'm hoping to hit a happy medium. LazyVim has excellent documentation of what goes on behind it's tidy curtains, including in-depth records of all the default plugins and keymaps. So I'll use that as a list of suggestions, augmented with some other tech blogger recommendations around which plugins/tweaks I should absolutely consider using, and I'll roll my own nvim via nixos.
Specifically, I'll use Nixvim. And I'll let Stylix take care of the styling. And I'll have the blessed nix package manager to keep my build stable as I increment my way toward the promised land on the other side of this river -- a fully reproducible OS, a bulletproof base of operations, a launching point into a dev career.
See, back in Omakub/Ubuntu land, it's easy. LazyVim is *exactly* what I wanted -- a batteries-included nvim setup that *just works*, that doesn't require weeks of setup to perfect and personalize. Just use the lazy plugin to quickly enable anything you like or turn off things you don't want, and bob's your uncle! you've got yourself a snazzy vi motion editor that can access any file with style (literally and technically), no questions asked.
But NixOS and Lazy seem to be uneasy companions. Nix is a jealous god, manages everything in the OS from a single source of truth. So whither lazyvim? Truth be told, I'm no expert in any of this. In the start of my omakub journey, I thought lazyvim was about the curated mix of plugins and config files and keymappings. I didn't realize that a 'lazy loader' had anything to do with it, since I had no prior experience to compare it with.
Well, now I've found that Lazyvim is the one thing I miss from the Arch/Ubuntu/Manjaro ventures of the past. I don't miss the lazy.nvim plugin per se, but I do wish that I had a way to get that same combo of plugins and configs. Or that I had the know-how to build it myself. I've had some time to percolate on it and I think I've hit on a solution.
A few months back I read a short blog post, and while I can't seem to find it at the moment, I remember the central argument was something like: "vanilla neovim is pretty solid, actually, and you're better off skipping the batteries-included stuff so you can (A) get an appreciation for the capabilities of unvarnished neovim, (B) pick only the plugins/configs/keymaps you actually want, and (C) understand what each plugin/config/keymap does".
Now, I don't have time in my life right now to spend weeks getting aquainted with the nuts and bolts of neovim, but I'm hoping to hit a happy medium. LazyVim has excellent documentation of what goes on behind it's tidy curtains, including in-depth records of all the default plugins and keymaps. So I'll use that as a list of suggestions, augmented with some other tech blogger recommendations around which plugins/tweaks I should absolutely consider using, and I'll roll my own nvim via nixos.
Specifically, I'll use Nixvim. And I'll let Stylix take care of the styling. And I'll have the blessed nix package manager to keep my build stable as I increment my way toward the promised land on the other side of this river -- a fully reproducible OS, a bulletproof base of operations, a launching point into a dev career.