Q&A

Do I need to be familiar with neovim to start using IceNvim?

The answer is affirmative. You need at least some knowledge with neovim to get started with IceNvim because it is, after all, a neovim configuration, differing considerably from editors like Visual Studio Code or Intellij IDEA.

The good news is that you do not need to be an expert (and frankly, experts do not use other people's configuration anyway). I would say that being familiar with the very basic editing in neovim would suffice, like cursor movement, mode switching, etc.

It would be even better if you know how to configure neovim, like knowing how to use lazy.nvim and creating autocmds, as you would be able to further customize IceNvim, making it even more powerful and to your taste.

Note

If you are a Chinese user, I would recommend my tutorial on bilibili to get you started with neovim.

Why should I choose IceNvim?

Let's not mention just how powerful IceNvim already is. What I am really proud for IceNvim about is the infinite possibility it grants. You can customize literally anything and not worry about making a mess of the original git repo. You could compare it to ArchLinux perhaps, which sets up a sound basis for you to add to and modify whatever you might like.

Is there no DAP support?

No. And that is intentional, since I do not use that and have no idea how to include it in my workflow.

Do I need to update plugins / tree-sitter parsers / LSPs / ... myself?

Yes. IceNvim does not force you to update anything unless you feel the necessity to do so. Hard as it is to believe, it is a luxry for many neovim users to access GitHub, and since almost everything included in IceNvim is downloaded from there, it would be a pain in the a** if updating is too frequent.

How do I contribute to IceNvim / this documentation?

Contribution is welcome. Just open a pull request even if it is as simple as a typo fix.

Or, if you want a certain feature or to fix a bug but does not know how to implement that, open an issue or discussion.