My sysadmin roots kept me living in default vim inside screen and tmux for years. Fortunately as my roles evolved, the world evolved, and I have also evolved as an engineer. I needed to level up to a better editor. Every time I tried vscode, it killed me. Every time I tried to rice vim or neovim myself, it was over my head. I discovered LazyVim and it was the boost I needed. I’ve been able to do much more advanced editing tasks and it’s quite fast.

However, I still wanted to keep my default neovim for when I really wanted to get in and out of an editor fast. I decided to launch LazyVim by typing lvim and leave my standard vim and nvim.

Fortunately neovim has a concept called NVIM_APPNAME that lets you load the app from an alternate configuration directory.

Pretty simple stuff.. Checkout lazyvim into ~/.config/lvim and make a command alias for lvim setting the NVIM_APPNAME variable

Here’s the key snippet from my lazyvim github gist.

git clone https://github.com/LazyVim/starter ~/.config/lvim
### put this in your shell profile
### you need neovim 0.9.newish for the NVIM_APPNAME param to work..
alias lvim="NVIM_APPNAME=lvim nvim"