Neovim

I started with kickstart.nvim. It was good to understand Lua and how neovim works. Now following LazyVim for Ambitious Developers because distros good, less breakage.

Look into kickstart.nvim . It's not a distribution but I think it will help you. Also after cloning the repo look up the video by tjdev(he is a maintainer on neovim).Or don't all config are self explanatory. There is twice the amount of comments than actual code.

I just use the lazy plugin manager (not to be confused with lazyvim) to set up a few plugins for my environment. I followed this guide and just chose only the plugins and configuration that I like. I've used vim for over 15 years now but have only used plugins for the past 2-ish years, so I don't like it when distributions mess up existing keybindings and other default behaviors. Lazy makes it very easy to set up your own environment and I was able to learn how to do it in a relatively short time with some guides and tutorials.

It's not for the faint of heart, but for me, I think the personal customizability is worth it, as well as not having plugins installed that I don't want/need. A lot of the time, they're more modern, but they would also require unlearning my existing habits and learning new ones, which I would rather not do, so I prefer doing it this way.

But I will say that it can be helpful to look at existing distributions to see how they implemented configurations when I run into trouble with my own configurations. Sometimes I'll steal their keybindings and maybe adjust them to my own preferences. It's also a great way to explore new functionality and configuration options as well.

Why not consider building one yourself "just for yourself"

I use LazyVim and I really like it. It doesn't try to force too much abstractions on you. It's basically a bunch of Lazy.nvim configs that you can easily modify without having to overwrite them as a whole. I also really like LazyVim's extras - preconfigured plugins disabled by default, but enablable via single item in config, or through TUI.

LazyVim. Didn't have time to do everything manually when I wanted to cut over from regular vim. I have quite a few customizations on top, but its a pretty solid base. I use with neovim nightly via nixos.

i use lazyvim every day. it just works and i'm, well, too lazy to configure nvim myself.

I really like Astronvim. Used it a lot at work.