LazyVim is what kept me using NeoVim. It made reproducing a usable setup much simpler.
Neovim
Just curious why is "reproducing the setup" important to you? You need to install it on a lot of systems?
I don't know about OP but personally I run nvim on 3 systems (4 if you count termux on my phone) and it's very nice being able to test out a config and plugin updates on my personal systems before pulling down the changes on my work laptop so I know everything just works™
I don't actually use LazyVim, but I do use the Lazy plugin manager
Changing, upgrading hardware or OSs makes reproducibility a highly valuable feature of an IDE.
@jim_stark @ericjmorey personally, I'm using my neovim config on personal Mac, work Windows laptop, WSL on windows and few other Linux machines (both personal and work related). It's at least 5 devices, each with different OS. If neovim would work differently on each of them and the environment wasn't reproducible, I'd give up with neovim
For me, LazyVim has been the easiest to config my own way of all the configuration setups. I've used many of the other ones, and they all felt so hard to make a change with them. LazyVim just works and is easy to add to and change things around.
I had the same personal experience (compared to spacevim, doomvim and lunarvim). I just want something feature rich working out of the box, like many other IDEs... With easy access to keyboard shortcut hints. And I want to be able to customize without breaking it. So far, I have been using doom emacs. The reason is that vim didn't have a curated set of plugins that I could tinker with without being frustrated. Again, this was my personal experience with it over the years. I just kept 'raw' vim, and used many other CLI tools around it (e.g. lazygit, a python REPL, etc.)
I never picked up any of these languages to be honest.. I mean, vimscript or Lua.
Maybe if I had, my experience would have been another. I know many people that know basic vimscript prefer to have 'vanilla' config, sometimes not even using vimplug or pkg managers. And they got along better than I did with my empty vimrc ;)