Best protip I heard about (n)vim customization: use git branches when you want to switch between different configurations. Eg something like:
- vanilla/default
- minimal
- fancy
depending on what you want to deal with. If I go months between using all these plugins I forget what they do and what changed and it’s just noisy distractions that invariably lead me to open my init.lua file rather than what I actually had intended to work on
you can also use $NVIM_APPNAME if you want a more "full" switch between configurations. especially helpful for trying/switching between distributions (i use it for switching between my own config and lazyvim). basically, it modifies the paths where neovim looks for config and data files on startup:
Since the configuration is done in (dot)files you can version and track them with git. If you want several setups you could have them in branches and just ´git checkout X´ in your .vim or .config/nvim directory to change it and it would affect settings and plugins (as they're also just files).
I don't need it but I can see the use. I do have a dotfiles repository however it's very common in Linux and Mac, don't know about Windows. If I setup a new machine or spin up a VM I just have to clone that repository to have all my configurations for everything (even addons for Firefox and Chrome).
This article[1] is a good starting point if you want to try it out.
- vanilla/default
- minimal
- fancy
depending on what you want to deal with. If I go months between using all these plugins I forget what they do and what changed and it’s just noisy distractions that invariably lead me to open my init.lua file rather than what I actually had intended to work on