These don't usually take off because people who use vim and emacs are people who insist on customizability and aren't into all the bloat that comes with IDEs. People who want IDEs aren't interested in an editor that lives in the terminal. There is a very limited market for something like this.
I disagree, I think these are helping people see neovim as a an alternative, drop-in replacement for VSCode or other editors with the added benefit of being vim.
I also think once people start using these regularly, they tend to learn more about neovim and vim universe how it can be customised to their needs, this acts as a starting point for many without the need to spend days/weeks setting it up to what they are used to.
And for most it becomes easy to just rely on the maintainers to add new additions via plugins and/or update as and when required without the need to update/break/debug on their own.
Using LazyVim got me over the hump to switch to neovim from vscode. My previous attempts failed when it took too long to get an IDE-compatible setup. I suppose I am the type of person that wants and IDE/editor that lives in the terminal!
I did the same thing and it was also a great learning aid. Now I run my own my own set of plugins but this got me past that initial learning curve. I think it says something that it finally happened to me after 4 decades of software development.
There’s a lot of people who want to make the jump but haven’t yet because the configuration seems complicated/unapproachable and they’ll lose too much productivity trying to figure it out or using it with a blank slate. These are great in such cases, I think.
I use IntelliJ Idea for work, and the most bloated NeoVim setup in the world doesn't even compare. I type "vim ." in a project directory and NeoVim, with a billion plugins, has come up by the time my finger is a cm off the enter key.
There's plenty of people inbetween the extremes. I don't want the bloat but I'm also busy (tired) and don't want to spend a weekend getting my dev env setup. These pre-made environments are great to dip my toes in the water; I get the speed of vim with some of the "batteries included" ergonomics of actual IDEs.
The draw of these imo is as a framework for building my own config. Something as relatively niche as the lua config for NeoVim is hard enough to find good code examples that nicely flushed out configs like this are a goldmine.
Strange generalization. There are many people who want exactly something like this. LazyVim has a very active community on GitHub and YouTube and many people use it daily. The same goes for other distros like LunarVim.
I have been using nvim for 3 years as an in-terminal IDE while maintaining my own config and have switched to LazyVim.
